It has already pretty much died, and I don't think it was by the hand of streaming. It was whatever process put a stop to new shows in the template of the really great shows we had in the past. At some point the risk taking stopped and everything just became the same drudge. Of course, there was always plenty of drudge.
It was the comedies that were particularly good and very British. Some were very unusual and bizarre, the late night shows. But they were also where writers and comedians got a break and then became mainstream. I would guess that kind of thing is now made for the internet, and its a shame to see everything go so niche.
An article I came across a couple of years ago (wish I could find it!) talked about how there was this period of time when British TV started to diversify the source of talent, around the 80s and 90s. You got shows like Red Dwarf where the cast were not all from the same small set of drama schools. But it has now reverted and that kind of low budget, take a chance show doesn't get shown on the main channels.
I think this is survivorship bias to a large degree.
Sturgeon's Law applied then as it does now; 90% of everything is crud. Go back 20-30 years, and the shows you remember as great are only a tiny fraction of the total output. Some (like Monty Python or Brass Eye) were extreme outliers.
Some shows seen as notable at the time are now mostly, though not always fairly, forgotten because they haven't aged well. Nobody's really watching, I don't know, The Onedin Line or Against the Wind today.
> Sturgeon's Law applied then as it does now; 90% of everything is crud. Go back 20-30 years, and the shows you remember as great are only a tiny fraction of the total output. Some (like Monty Python or Brass Eye) were extreme outliers.
I want to back up and support this point: just pull up a list of shows on Wikipedia from any TV channel you can remember, ideally one with a long history and just go through the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s etc. You're going to find a lot more cream the further forward you go into the future, and maybe, depending on the channel and your own personal tastes, a drop off in the last 10 to 15 years. Most TV was just bad, but old TV especially. For every "All in the Family" or "Cosby Show" or "The Wire" or "Frasier"; or to make this more British: "Sherlock", "Doctor Who", "Monty Python's Flying Circus", there's just dozens upon dozens of terrible shows. They each had their audiences, the ones that weren't cancelled (and even some of the ones that were), but it's like, nobody remembers the dirt underneath the flower, but they remember the flowers that they liked.
I would argue Monty python is in fact not an exception. Their best sketches are just outstanding, but their median sketches are very unfunny indeed.
The actual exception is e.g. the life of Brian where you have 90 minutes where almost every scene is funny or at least engaging. Compare with e.g. the holy grail where the best 90% is quite good but the rest is... Not...
I think this misses the broader point of how revolutionary they were. They were hugely original and experimental, breaking with a lot of comedy conventions and redefining them. They've been compared to The Beatles for good reason. They were never the same kind of worldwide phenomenon, but they were equally influential.
Sure. They may have had their misses, but the Pythons were exceptional. A classic TV show, two fantastic movies (plus a flawed one), a live stage show that's become a classic — they were among the best of their era, and we're still talking about them.
> At some point the risk taking stopped and everything just became the same drudge.
Same for all the big name movies these days, everyone is too scared to take a chance on something truly new. If you want a novel movie experience you basically have to look towards foreign films, often the more arty types (which I love
On the topic of TV though just consider this for a moment, we lived in a world where someone was daring enough to air "Paedogeddon!" (a Brass Eye special that imo is an excellent work of satire) on TV. Something so controversial couldn't be made and aired today and it was barely able to be even back then.
'Speaking in October 2017, Lucas stated that if he were to remake Little Britain he would avoid making jokes about transvestites and would not play the role of a black character, saying, "Basically, I wouldn't make that show now. It would upset people. We made a more cruel kind of comedy than I'd do now... Society has moved on a lot since then and my own views have evolved".'
Basically the risk taking has gone in modern comedy.
Little Britain just hasn’t aged well. The sketches were always more about repetition than wit, relied on caricature a lot and mistook shock value for satire.
You couldn’t make Little Britain today mostly because it wasn’t very good, and the standards of the time were lower.
You could absolutely remake The Day Today, Brass Eye, Goodness Gracious Me or Peep Show today and they’d be just as good.
I agree, it’s often held up as a “risk taking” show but I don’t think it wasn’t really anything of the sort.
At the moment post 1997 when Britain was starting to change and become more diverse and sure of it itself it reinforced an identify of Britain as it used to think of itself: silly voices, binary identities and oddballs.
It has more in common with Love Thy Neighbour than anything that came after.
Yeah, that whole era of things like the Jimmy Carr gameshows were honestly a sort of mass nastiness as entertainment.
This business where we're all supposed to be surprised by what Russell Brand was up to despite him being incredibly open about it at the time is the same thing: society wants to blame the highly visible individuals of that era but in truth it was the audience that wanted this stuff that were the problem.
You could barely make Brass Eye in 2001, as their 2001 special proved, never mind today. And you absolutely wouldn't get away with Goodness Gracious Me.
> You could barely make Brass Eye in 2001, as their 2001 special proved,
I still hold that special up as one of the best pieces of satire to ever air on TV, but at the same time I'm shocked it was ever able to be produced and shown since it satirizes the one topic above all others you aren't "allowed" to joke about.
The episode was also made at a time when it was fashionable to hold the view that the country was gripped by a kind of irrational hysteria about child sexual abuse. Monkey Dust's 'pedofinder general', from around the same time period, reflects a similar attitude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCywGhHQMEw
Decades later this all looks rather naive. The BBC, especially, could hardly make a program satirizing exaggerated concerns about child sexual abuse, given that the
Savile scandal proved that many such concerns had in fact been taken nowhere near seriously enough.
Their "Paedogeddon" special would have been highly controversial in any time and was also far beyond what they did before. Do you really think it could have been made in the 70s or 80s?
A lot of comedy back then was about laughing at the absurdities of a shared life.
The absurdities of yesterday have been changed - and there can be no actual normality today when there are no absurdities. Laughing at absurdities was not considered cruel.
With no common shared understanding of what's funny or not. Today we can laugh at cruel people only. The cruel and those who think others are weird are the strange ones.
Comedy used to be "look at us, hahaha" now it's "look at them, heh". Real comedy has truth and the truth is always about ourselves not some external other. But such vulnerability is very risky.
There's an interview with Bob Monkhouse about making TV in the 50s/60s; he wasn't allowed to say "condom" on TV, and would get fined if he said "bloody".
There's as always a "taboo" on some things. Lots of jokes about sex and religion today that would see you completely crucified in the past. Do you think The Thick of It could have been made in the 80s?
I never cared for Little Britain and haven't seen it, so I can't comment on their "jokes about transvestites", but this whining about "PC gone mad!" has been going on for 40+ years. A few decades ago it was about "you can't make fun of the pakis and nig-nogs any more!"
I suspect the same number of people were upset in 2006 as would be upset in 2017. But there wasn't a social media platform for those upset views to be expressed and easily measured.
This idea of "oh everyone is offended these days" is a bit weird to me; the 'these days' part I mean. There was a lot of comedy from the past that was... awkward to me as a kid, or just... felt unnecessarily cruel. But I was in a minority, or at least felt like it, with some of those. And... I don't think I changed, but I now can hear/read about others who share the same sensibilities on comedic topics.
The notion that it's somehow "more" people getting "offended" today just strikes me as odd. It may be that as more folks have a platform to share their views, that influences some folks, but I'm not sure that works on all topics. Certainly... on comedy, I've heard many of complaints about some comics/topics. Rarely has anyone's view of a comedy bit made me change my position. If I found it cringe/bad, I found it cringe/bad.
back in days you'd just be "allowed" to make fun out of minorities with them not being able to fight back. now you aren't, and thus the majorities are "oppressed" and everything is "politically correct".
i'm bi. sometimes I watch old Polish comedies or standups. The amount of "jokes" that are just good old bigotry is stupendous.
so when people say they're tired of "political correctness", I do wonder if they mean - I am no longer allowed to be bigot openly, why can't I kick those who I consider to be below me.
People made fun of others and themselves. Now it's only okay to "punch up" which makes things unfunny. It's great you can make fun of religion well only one religion but the rules constrain novel ideas that push outside of those rules to make actual humor. Tell me something I haven't heard before with some truth.
The repeated going back to the well makes everything unfunny. The first time a Polish joke was said was in Poland many Polish watching laughed because their was kernel of truth that made it funny but years later hearing it repeated like it's gospel makes it awful because people have changed but the joke doesn't so it doesn't land as true anymore. Once we start looking why the joke is untrue instead of why it's true the joke is dead.
Saturday night live always tries to go back to a joke that was never really that funny.
My son is a teenager but loves to watch old politically incorrect comedies like "Airplane". There's no way you could make that movie today... but there's certainly a market for it, cruel or not.
Now that I think about it, it's no more cruel than what most kids watch on YouTube today.
Airplane could be made today, the central premise would hold up well, some of the skits in it would have to be dropped or altered. Most things that were made in one period could not be made whole cloth in another period.
There is an airplane movie from this year! No idea if it can hold up to the old ones and I don't have time to watch movies these days: Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines.
There are tons of dialects and accents and group slang that the joke could be done with. Doing basic generational slang would likely flop, but you could easily use something like a thick accent from Texas like Boomhower in King of the Hill, or a Louisiana Creole accent, or some deep Appalacian accent, or some Spanglish.
1 is why I said or an equivalent - you could do the same with pidgin or any creole or, I don't know if this is a PC way to say it, but any kind of 'hood' or 'ghetto' type slang. The joke is just person is 'fluent' in an unlikely dialect/way of speaking. If cockney rhyming slang were more prevalent you could do that, with you know a black American or Asian person or whatever being the unlikely fluent one.
2 is is not really the point, sure it could flop, my point was just that I couldn't imagine it going further than that, not that that would be funny.
and to say what I said before, hardly any movie that was made in one generation can be made in another. There will always be things that have to be changed. This same thing applies to basically every other work of art - despite the valiant efforts of Pierre Menard.
The protagonist with Vietnam flashbacks would obviously have to be altered, you couldn't have skits about Ronald Reagan - nobody knows who he is, nor do they know who Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is.
Having the autopilot smoking after being inflated doesn't make sense in a world where barely anyone smokes.
It's been a few years since I watched Airplane, and while I absolutely love it, I recall it being rather tame even by modern standards. I can think of a few gags that might not land as well today, but I don't think it was mean-spirited.
"Oh, stewardess! I speak jive" would absolutely get you cancelled today. I don't think it's mean-spirited either but that's not enough to save you these days.
In Blindspotting (2018), a white protagonist is shown as being able to fluently speak an incomprehensibly dense version of AAVE, and it’s revealed later he has no idea what he’s saying (despite communicating effectively). I’ve never seen anyone criticize that joke.
Airplane is mostly physical humor and dumb wordplay. 90% of the jokes would be fine as-is. There are a few you'd have to update, but that's hardly surprising for a movie released 35 years ago. You could have said the same in 1980 about most comedies made in 1945.
Little Britain was always crap and completely mainstream and non-edgy. It's a series of one joke sketches based on familiar stereotypes. I don't want to 'cancel' it, and the occasional sketch gets a titter out of me. But to hold it up as an example of edgy, groundbreaking comedy is quite absurd. You can find oodles of much edgier and funnier shows on British TV today.
Comparing all programming in the 80s and 90s to current programming is going to throw up more “hits” for the multi-decade time range than the contemporary.
There are a few other comments listing them all. The uk has lots of high quality novel shows coming out every year. Our tv export market is strong, both for programming and for formats.
It's not just the time range that's the issue with that comparison. Older shows had less competition and had a longer time to develop a cult following.
But yes, the low budget is part of the formula for success. Without a ton of money, they had to rely on wit and creativity. Most shows now have comparatively gargantuan budgets, and it goes on big sets, big effects and big names, but the things that actually make a show good (compelling story, enjoyable writing) are unbottleable magic that you can’t just buy.
Red Dwarf used practical effects in the era when VideoToasters were a thing. For some reason the BBC replaced the lovely miniature shots of space ships with crap CG in a mid-2000s remaster.
I find it interesting that you mention red dwarf. As I started reading your comment I thought I'd comment something "i think that's just nostalgia, for example red dwarf is awful but people love it". And then you mention red dwarf.
Eye of the beholder. I personally think Red Dwarf series 1 to 6 was great. It even charts a course of British TV decline. Series 1 and 2, low budget sitcom, class warfare and the loneliness of space. Series 3, more budget, more sci-fi, but similar writing. Series 4 and 5, more budget, more sci-fi, becomes monster of the week, but the character building from the prior series keeps it funny. Series 6, even more budget, they start to explore some more interesting sci-fi themes. This turns out to be popular, so it gets more budget again and moves to BBC 1, more cast etc. Series 7, 8 just urgh, trying to appeal to "mainstream" was stupid because it was already popular enough, it loses the serious side. Everything they've done since then feels like they're trying to force the humour that came naturally before. The actors have aged but the writing didn't mature with them.
I watched some interviews with the cast and they would joke around in the canteen between filming and find their jokes had been overheard and incorporated into the script. It had this realistic dialogue.
It isn’t just comedies - there used to be a plethora of interesting documentaries produced by the beeb, to the extent that for a while they had a channel (BBC 4) pretty much dedicated to them. I used to be able to find something interesting on there any day of the week, and likewise, iPlayer held a great catalogue of content. BBC 4 was slated to be axed a few years ago, first thing on the chopping block. They seem to be stuck in decision paralysis, which is absolutely emblematic of what faces them.
While the BBC still produce documentaries, the quality has declined over the last decade or so, and when Attenborough dies they will be fresh out of ideas, as right now it’s just… Attenborough, and licensed human interest pieces.
I just can’t see it being a thing in 10, 20 years, as they surmise - I would wager they will whittle away until all that remains is BBC News, which will run on a shoestring, even more than it does now.
I've noticed this a lot with anti-BBC folks. They have some ideological issue with it but that isn't a popular position so they go for more niche arguments like "The entire historical catalogue isn't fully available to watch on demand" or "They axed BBC <insert number> from broadcast". Arguments they don't actually care about. It's just a way to snipe at the BBC.
As you've pointed out, if someone loves being able to watch BBC Four on broadcast TV, they're not going to be complaining about it's non existent axing.
The problem is that BBC Four now only shows archive material (with occasional exceptions as "overflow capacity" from sports events etc.) whereas they used to commission their own documentaries.
Whatever happens, they need to decriminalise the license fee.
"Almost a third of women’s convictions are for not paying the TV licence fee, figures have revealed.
Women are ten times more likely to be convicted for not paying the £157.50 annual fee than men – with growing numbers of women then being slapped with criminal records, Ministry of Justice data shows."
this modern style of criticism is so tiring. if you philosophically disagree with something, don't try to abuse the defence of an oppressed group as a rhetorical technique to make it harder for people to argue with you, just say you disagree with it and why
even if you genuinely believe this is why it should be decriminalised, if women are being disproportionally affected, then clearly either there's some kind of bias in the process, which should simply be fixed instead of disbanding the whole process, or women are simply less skilled at dealing with situations like this and need more help. either way it's not an issue with the concept of the license fee
I actually don't disagree that the license fee in its current format is a problem, ideally it should just be impossible to access it without having paid, but I don't think it's feasible with the way freeview works
Anecdotal, but out of my family I’m the only man who doesn’t pay the licence fee, and the only person who hasn’t had a visit.
They’ve visited my mother, sister and one auntie that don’t pay - they all live alone and are the sole name on the bill.
I’ve heard from friends similar experiences too, single men and households with men on the electoral register don’t get visits, or very rarely if they do.
I had the pleasure of answering the door at my mothers to one of these people and believe there’s an issue with the way they choose who to investigate. It’s predatory.
Suspect more obvious factors are that men are far less likely to be home during the daytime when inspectors visit, and also more likely to admit they've had a TV for years or let the inspector in if he asks nicely...
(FWIW I'm had a visit shortly after I'd moved in with five other guys before, and avoided prosecution by simply asking how to pay...)
This is my theory. My relatives wouldn’t have a clue whether they were lying about being some official inspector and saying they’re allowed to inspect, and they would probably be scared of either an official looking, or bailiff looking person telling them this.
I don't pay it because I don't watch television anymore, live or otherwise.
However I do find the overreach of claiming I need to pay the license if I watch any form of live broadcast is ridiculous. If I wanted to watch the occasional live stream of a football game online via Amazon Prime then I would need to pay the license fee.
People are prosecuted for this with zero evidence other than an ‘admission’, with the admission being as nebulous as ‘yeah the tv is on’.
How can you prove someone was watching TV in court? As far as I’m aware you can’t, but the court sides with Capita generally. Please don’t bring up the TV detecting vans as evidence.
It’s not really a topic of conversation that I’d bring up, but I know many people who do pay it so you aren’t the only one.
I don’t because I don’t use anything that requires me to, not from a moral standpoint. The BBC has given me a lot of fantastic content over the years but I’ve just stopped consuming most television over the past 5 years or so.
No, I do too, and I’m happy to do so. I’ve always felt it’s a useful brake on over-commercialisation of other channels, although perhaps less effective now than it once was. I do enjoy quite a bit of the BBC’s output as well.
I feel there's a huge problem in this debate, which is that the people who don't like it are extremely vocal, and the people who do like it and quietly use and enjoy it without necessarily adoring it, perhaps like you, who I suspect are a majority, are just not really represented in the conversation, and the people who love it, like me, do not really have a central reference point from which to draw power from unlike the people who don't like it, who have the entire right-wing media crowing about it at every opportunity
You might be underrating my ardour on this as I've said my piece at greater length before.
I've always been in favour of (something like) the license fee to fund a non-commercial national public service broadcaster. Public service broadcasting is incredibly important otherwise it's all just commercial interests and you end up with the kind of nonsense you get in the TV landscape in the USA: low quality content, far too many ads, dominance of hyper-partisan "news", etc.
And if you look at what the BBC does - the TV channels, iPlayer, the national radio stations, local radio, news, the world service, the ground-breaking content they've created over the decades, and of course licensing/reselling content - it's incredibly impressive and, to me at any rate, represents incredibly good value for money as compared to other providers.
The TV license costs about the same as an annual Netflix subscription but the BBC is able to do so much more with that money than Netflix are. Doesn't even compare in my mind.
Not to mention the people who are extremely vocal about how horrible and woke it is for having too many minorities and that Mr Lineker also overlaps heavily with people who have watched it continuously for 50 years, wouldn't dream of switching over to newfangled channels like Channel 4 and don't know what an Amazon is...
I doubt Capita would have any fallout from an inquiry, it would be another headline for a day or two then get forgotten by the media. I’m all for it though, they should be held accountable, my first statement is purely cynicism from me.
depends who the government is really. I'd be cautiously optimistic that the current government would do something about it, ideally taking it out of the hands of a private company in the first place. this government is too nervous for that kind of thing, but I do think they could do something about it.
That’s got me thinking, who controls that? Do the BBC willingly employ Capita to enforce the licence, or are they mandated to enforce it in some way and Capita just so happen to be the vultures that were cheapest to hire?
> if women are being disproportionally affected, then clearly either there's some kind of bias in the process, which should simply be fixed instead of disbanding the whole process, or women are simply less skilled at dealing with situations like this and need more help
Or they're more comfortable breaking that particular law (under the same conditions). I'm not saying that _is_ the case, but it is one of the possibilities.
>The ministry’s report admits the chief reason why so many women wind up being prosecuted is because they are more likely to open the door to inspectors.
Men literally or figuratively tell the inspectors to fuck off, women don’t. It’s not bias, systemic issues, or whatever. It’s entirely on how women handle the situation that explains the difference.
Right, but the post I was responding to was listing out reasons that women might be prosecuted more, including being targeted more. So, unless you mean that they are targeted more _because_ they are more likely to open the door to inspectors, my point stands.
They need to figure it a different way to do enforcement that’s not as discriminatory. The current approach leads to disparate outcomes and is therefore inherently discriminatory
It's not necessarily discriminatory just because it winds up impacting one group more than another.
For example, if you have 2 groups of people and one of the groups is doing something wrong twice as much, and you enforce the law on everyone... it's fair, not discriminatory. (Ignoring the fact that what is labelled "wrong" can be done in such a way as to be discriminatory. I'm assuming a neutral view of what is wrong )
> I actually don't disagree that the license fee in its current format is a problem, ideally it should just be impossible to access it without having paid, but I don't think it's feasible with the way freeview works
So you think that it should just be privatised like netflix. If you don't think public service broadcasting has a place, just don't try to hide it.
I think if you knew me you would know that I am the absolute last person who wants to privatise the BBC. the privatisation of the BBC would be the end of my world. I think the public ownership of the BBC, and the BBC in general is the greatest cultural achievement of modern Britain.
I just think that instead of making it so that people can fuck up and not pay by accident or by laziness, it would be better if there was no way for that to happen. it has nothing to do with public vs private ownership
I don't get the TV license model myself. I think a government should collect taxes and provide services without adding elaborate schemes to pretend something else is happening.
the point is that it partially takes it out of the hands of the government of the day. if it were solely funded by taxes, it would be long since dead or privatised by now, and if it weren't it would be entirely beholden to pleasing the government. maybe in a more mature country it could work, but not here
I think the license fee, with a couple of tweaks, could be absolutely ingenious. the best of both worlds. the freedom of choice of the free market, and the lack of commercialism of the public sector, and no one has to pay taxes for it. however, it does restrict user choice somewhat by forcing them to pay for it to watch any live tv, even football on streaming platforms. I think there could be a discussion to be had about changing it to where users pay just to watch the BBC and not live tv in general
If you want to change it to a BBC subscription fee, then you're just changing the BBC into Netflix. The whole point of the BBC is that everyone pays and everyone can benefit - same as the NHS, or libraries, or roads.
I think the only way that change could work while protecting the BBCs editorial independence and maintain its public service remit would be to have it as part of council tax. A £160 a year charge on a band D house (with appropriate discounts for Band A-C and excess for E-H). The default amount would be set as the license fee is now.
that's not the point of the BBC whatsoever, otherwise it would just be a tax like everything else publicly owned. it's precisely the opposite in fact. it's voluntary
It's never been changed to a direct tax to prevent direct interference from the government
The BBC has an obligation to serve everyone, not just subscribers. Netflix has an obligation to serve subscribers, at least well enough that they don't leave.
>It's never been changed to a direct tax to prevent direct interference from the government
that's half of the reason, and also feeds into the other reason. if it's not a direct tax and it's semi-voluntary it's harder for people to criticise as unfair. not that they don't find a way
>The BBC has an obligation to serve everyone, not just subscribers. Netflix has an obligation to serve subscribers, at least well enough that they don't leave.
this is an intrinsic property of Netflix being a private business, not Netflix being a subscription service. the BBC could comfortably move to a subscription model and still have the exact same ethos. the BBC's payment model is not so different from a subscription model that right now a private company would be serving license fee payers rather than everyone in general
Seems like an awful lot for TV, and where most of the friction in the custom design is for the public.
All the other areas that republic misdesign hits have much larger budgets and much more corruption, but those topics are a bit harder for the public to engage with so a special program does very nicely at preventing any system corrections.
I enjoy the way you think and phrase your thoughts (are you on ketamine?), but I think that publicly-owned broadcasting, particularly (exclusively) the entertainment side of things, is the opposite of republic misdesign. it's a freak accident of something very very positive and joyful and broadly selfless rising above the waves of self-interest and corruption and misery.
I think the news part of the BBC should be removed, maybe spun off into a separate entity
I think you misunderstood my sub-point.. I think we both agree about the BBC as a wonderful result. I question the motives for a special system of protecting it in a government that doesn't seem to get any better at other sectors.
Of of the BBCs jobs is to scrutinise the government. Editorial independence is essential. You can argue how well it does this, but if the government has direct control over its funding, it clearly won't be doing that task any better.
my understanding of the justification for a special system is that it's inherently more fragile and more tempting to attack than other government services, which generally provide tangibly vital, life-preserving services, rather than less tangible artistic and cultural ones, and the particular form of the service lends itself to being funded in a way that wouldn't work for other more vital services
healthcare is possibly one of the few that could (i.e. does in other Western countries) work similarly, but people including me would undoubtedly despise it. most things need some kind of mandated funding otherwise they would fail and people would die, go homeless, not have a military or live tangibly worse lives, and mandated taxed funding is generally better because it relies more on those with broader shoulders
overall I personally reject your notion that there's some kind of subversive justification for it
It's not modern, although I don't disagree that it's more common. But you do have jokes even back to the 80s of "world ending, women and minorities most effected."
Your complaint would have much more merit if there wasn’t hundreds of years of examples of women being systematically discriminated against and having the system unfairly target them.
Some remarkable doublethink from the BBC in that article:
"The BBC said licence fee avoidance did not bring with it a criminal record. A spokesperson said: “Details of the offence are not held on the Police National Computer – so while there is a criminal conviction there is no criminal record.”"
So yeah, people, mainly women, go to prison but I guess it's not a big deal on paper.
no one is going to prison for not paying the license fee. the article brings up prison, but only as a way to sneakily associate it with non-license fee payment in a way that clearly worked on you
And yet many people (mainly women) go to prison for, in essence, not paying the licence fee. The fact that they technically go to prison for not complying with a court order is merely splitting hairs.
I cancelled my license in the wake of the Saville scandal when it was finally admitted what was common knowledge inside the BBC: that they had been covering up a sex offender on their payroll for years. Obviously 'lessons were learned' so when Huw Edwards came along they repeated all the same mistakes.
is it splitting hairs though? they're going to prison for refusing to engage with the justice system, which is a very normal thing to go to prison for the world over. what the original offence was isn't really relevant
> is it splitting hairs though? they're going to prison for refusing to engage with the justice system, which is a very normal thing to go to prison for the world over. what the original offence was isn't really relevant
It is relevant, though. If someone who wouldn't otherwise have been dragged into the receiving end of the justice system gets dragged into it, and then has to comply with all its bureaucracy, it matters whether or not that person should have been dragged into it. ("Should" in both a legal sense and a sense of morality or equity.)
my perspective is that we shouldn't be shaping our laws based on whether the least competent 0.001% of society can deal with the administrative implications. if you're so incompetent that you can't handle any of the many many stages between paying your license fee and going to prison, then you've got bigger issues and perhaps you should be in care or still in school
on the other hand if they're deliberately not engaging with those stages, then it's hard to really feel much sympathy
You keep mentioning the "mainly women" bit. Does that really matter that much? If mainly men were the ones impacted, would that change how good or bad the policy is?
It matters under the UK's equality laws. If something like this affects one class more than another then there's an obligation to learn why that is, as the answer may lead to a court finding the, in this case enforcement process, to be unlawful.
It always seems crazy to me that in the early 1980s the BBC undertook the Computer literacy project, commissioned Acorn Computers to manufacture the BBC Micro, and produced educational content to support learning and use around said system itself.
I understand why the chances of that being a profitable enterprise now given the development of computing hardware are practically zero, but even the idea that the BBC would produce interesting educational content now seems wild (not counting documentaries as that's not often something that provides information you can act on and use). If I want that kind of content now it's pretty much a guarantee that I'll end up on YouTube.
Nowadays they're a non-neutral-seeming news outlet and producer of low-risk dreck that also demands I pay the UK TV Licence fee even just to watch _other_ channels. Do I need a reading licence to read books written by other people? Didn't think so.
At this point it's simply a subscription fee for a service I don't want, and so I don't subscribe. Bring back quality content (subjective of course, but some variety would go a long way), perhaps some risk-taking (something on par with Channel 4's Utopia seems like a good goal). Oh, and perhaps cut the salaries of some of the unnecessarily highly-paid reporters. Just a thought.
They still produce a huge amount of content in conjuction with the Open University, and most of that educational content you're referring to was OU content as well. The quality of it is much better than it was (trust me).
The "non-neutral-seeming news" you refer to suggests you've bought into the narrative proposed by those who don't feel served by it - both the far right and the far left, which suggests it must be doing something right - and famously the BBC has some of the most stringent and well-thought through editorial guidelines on earth. If somebody is telling you the BBC is biased, they're also probably suggesting some other news source (their own? GB News? Fox? An anti-vaxx group on FB?), is not.
The BBC could be doing a lot more to monetise through BBC Worldwide (their commercial arm), a massive, and massively popular, back catalogue to a point where the license fee could be reduced or even eliminated. The idea it becomes a generic streaming platform or relies on commercials regularly gets floated, but it's worth pointing out that the biggest supporters of that plan are owners of commercial media companies that feel they would win out and their narratives and perspectives would get to dominate.
It is a ~£13 subscription, sure, but compare it to what you get compared to say Sky TV, which also has adverts, and think about whether clipping it back to an offering similar to C4 (also public sector owned, but ad funded), would be something that actually makes you happier, and whether that editorial integrity could be maintained and all that local radio and journalism could still get paid for - they're arguably the only organisation still doing local journalism in the UK given the dog's dinner Reach is making of local papers.
I sense the future is going to a Reith-ian reset, and you'll see less investment in lower-rating, higher-cost programming (bye bye Eastenders or other soaps), sustained investment in audience favourites like Strictly, and perhaps a dial-up in drama to take on the commercial sector that they can then monetise through BBC Worldwide (including getting streamers to pay for access to it).
As to the other broadcasters, the picture is a little less confusing: the studios and production companies are doing fine, even if they're now selling to Amazon, Netflix, Apple and Disney. The channels themselves will just use their brand to shift people into those channels. Unfortunately, they're miles behind on the tech (just go and try ITV X - it's awful from a UX perspective), but they'll figure it out.
I'd add that while I agree that the BBC could and perhaps should be doing a lot more to make profit from BBC Worldwide, I think the concern there is that too much focus on that could start to bring in unwanted incentives, such as prioritising the demands of foreign viewers over domestic, or even advertisers
To some extent, that has already happened. Strictly is now in almost every major market under a different name (Dancing with the Stars, etc.), Attenborough nature-docs are widely revered and incredibly popular, and Top Gear got into almost every country except the US (which got its own version), until a series of controversies (first Hammond almost dying, then Clarkson punching a producer, then Chris Evans being himself, then Flintoff almost dying), pushed it into the "let's stop doing this" list - at huge cost.
For things where a format sale works (shows that need to be made locally to resonate, like Strictly), I think your concern is less of a risk. Attenborough/Top Gear style high-quality expensive content packages are more of a concern, but I think the worst we've seen there is that they end up doing weird things with the timings. You know in the UK that Attenborough docs run for 50 minutes, and there is then a 10 minutes "how we made it" bit? Foreign markets don't get that last bit - they buy the 50 minutes package, put ads around it to get it to an hour. In the UK we get a 10 minute filler DVD bonus track.
more interesting info. I'd also add Doctor Who as a really prominent example of it. the most recent series of Doctor Who is quite obviously aimed at more of an American audience, with a star known to Americans, being released on Disney, with Disney production values. whether that fully counts or is just a product of a production partnership or whether the production partnership is itself a sign of it, I do not know
BBC is great but it is very biased. There’s no such thing as neutral news and the front page is full of pro-western and pro-british articles. You could argue it’s in the middle of the British political spectrum but that’s inherently a bias towards the status quo.
There’s nothing wrong with biased news but it’s important to recognize what their perspective really is. Thinking it’s neutral is dangerous and you’ll never know the truth if you believe that!
2. Find the same ones for your favourite news source.
3. Ask if the balance is reasonable for a British broadcaster, paid for by British people, to address stories of interest of British interest from a British perspective by applying those editorial guidelines.
4. Go and explore the times that the BBC has actively investigated and reported on exclusives critical of British foreign and domestic policy - there's more examples than you'd find at any other broadcaster in the World, I think.
If you'd like to point out examples of where the editorial guidelines are poor, or weren't applied in a particular scenario, or even an example of perceived bias that is entirely unbalanced, I'm happy to hear it. More often than not people complaining of bias are complaining that it reported something they disagreed with, but like I say, both the far left and the far right hate the BBC, anarchists hate it, authoritarians hate it - if they're annoying everyone apart from the more sensible majority that want to see all sides of a story, they're probably doing something very right.
You’re completely missing the point and I don’t think you actually know what “bias” means.
> a British broadcaster, paid for by British people, to address stories of interest of British interest from a British perspective
This is exactly my point. You’re going to get news from maybe 1% of the full ideological spectrum and nowhere near “all sides” of any story. The BBC has a strong bias towards status quo opinions (“ of British interest from a British perspective”). The news they don’t report on is equally as important as what they do publish.
It's the same with Canadian television. Pre-2000 its full of interesting, educational programming, post-2000 its a wasteland (not including Pre-Netflix Trailer Park Boys).
The idea that you could cheaply and affordably replay lectures with video, demonstrate concepts visually, show foreign lands and peoples, all with low cost of production was captivating to many.
Computers were initially seen by educators as a path to interactive TV. Making it easy to find video info, and to index it, even rotate images (repair videos and part assemble for example).
Point is, TV was seen a more than entertainment, it was a tool that could be employed to teach. Computers more so.
Then the Internet came, and it was at first mostly educational, intellectual. Sort of the inverse of what it is now.
Once everything exploded, it became entertainment primarily. Sort of like TV. The educational aspect is there, but muted.
Obtaining information from potentially interactive websites is better in every way than via TV. It’s obsolete technology.
Therefore, the BBC needs to transition to a website that happens to send signals out via TV for legacy users, but primarily, it’s competing with TikTok/Youtube/Khan Academy/Instagram/Whatsapp/Reddit/Disney/Comcast/Netflix/Sony/WarnerBros Discovery/etc. They all compete with each other, globally.
BBC sells minutes of entertainment/education/etc, and there are a fixed number of minutes in a day.
Given that the BBC has failed to offer their own solution for the many British and other people living abroad or with second homes abroad who would be interested in accessing their content, and instead driven us to consume a small subset of their content through Netflix, my sympathy is limited.
In the US and watch Britbox and Acorn at least as much as other providers now. We watch a lot of Aussie and British shows, new and old, color and B/W.
The BBC made really great shows. If they go under, it’s a shame. I would pay tax to help the BBC keep going. I’d pay the Aussies, too, if they’re not getting comp’d.
You're mixing up different bits of tech, streaming services (like BBC's iPlayer) don't care (or know) what DNS servers you're using. To get around their geo-blocking you need to change your IP address, either by using a VPN service or a proxy server.
He's probably talking about one of those "smart dns proxy" services. The way they work is that they return a proxy server IP for geoblocked domains, and the normal IP for everything else. The proxy server in turn figures out which server to connect to using the SNI header.
It's misleading to call it "change your dns to a uk server", but he's also not totally making it up either.
Yeah I'm not accusing them of lying, sure if they use a service that also includes proxying then that can bypass geo restrictions it just has nothing to do with DNS or the country the DNS server is in.
why say something if you quite clearly don't actually know anything about the thing you're saying? do you really think I'm saying this without having done this myself many times? without it being a well-known and well-publicised method?
my friend I will ask you again: why are you saying this if you haven't actually tried it? google it if you don't believe me. I have used the technique many times, and just because you think geoblocking works one way does not mean that it actually does
If it worked for you, that could be because when you changed your DNS server you also changed your public IP, or possibly because you used a service that doesn't just provide DNS but also caches content meaning you were accessing it without touching the BBC's servers.
There just isn't any aspect of BBC's geo blocking that cares what DNS servers you use, and if you go spend 5 minutes on Google looking into how geo-blocking works you won't find anyone talking about DNS servers being relevant.
I can't speak to your personal experience as I wasn't there, but I do have experience on the side of actually doing geo-blocking so I can say with confidence how that works. Apart from anything, the website / streaming service literally doesn't have any way of knowing what country your DNS server is in... the DNS server is just the thing that your computer asks "where does bbc.co.uk point to?" and it replies with the IP address for that domain. From the BBC's point of view your visit looks identical regardless of which DNS server gave that answer. There are ways of doing geo-blocking that are more complicated than just IP address (though BBC doesn't use them, it just goes on IP address), but none of them involve DNS.
I just did that search, and several pages talk about "smart DNS services" which also proxy your IP... not a single result suggesting that DNS itself is relevant.
The thing is, I'm not guessing, I'm someone who has actually spent time learning about how networking works, doing my first Cisco course when I was 17, and then in my adult career I've on multiple occasions been involved in implementing geo-blocking.
So I'm sorry if I haven't been clear, or have given the impression of being an idiot to the point that you think not worth listening to anything I say, but if you actually go and read up about how geo-blocking works you will find out that I'm not making things up when I say that BBC cannot tell the location of your DNS server, and if you've found that using a particular DNS service does bypass the restrictions then it still has nothing to do with DNS other than that the DNS provider is also offering you a proxy service.
>-- a site not being able to tell the location of your dns server, which is true
>-- your dns server not affecting how sites adjudge your location, which is not
Neither of these statements are definitively true/false.
1. Sites can most certainly tell the IP (and thus the location) of your DNS server. There are many sites that demonstrate this, just search for "dns leak test". Whether sites actually use this is another question.
2. Sites can serve different IPs (servers) depending on the DNS server, or even the client (through the edns client subnet extension). Some CDNs use this strategy to route requests to the closest server. However, this fact is a red herring when it comes to assessing whether "just change your dns to a UK server" is a viable strategy for getting bbc iplayer to work, because its geoblock checks based on IP of the http request, not through DNS.
There's also the question of "smart dns proxies"[1], which make it seem like all you're doing is "change your dns server to a UK server", but there's far more that goes under the hood than just changing your DNS server, because it's actually proxying your traffic as well. Changing your dns server to a uk server that isn't a smart dns proxy wouldn't get you pass bbc's geoblocks.
British TV is doing _great_ in the streaming era: black mirror, adolescence, peaky blinders, the crown, call the midwife, derry girls, downtown abbey; and so many great police procedurals: line of duty, endeavour, the bay, Sherlock, grace; even those Harlan coben miniserieses - the ones with at least one absurd plot twist per episode - are great fun!
While I’ll be among the first to moan that we’ll never see another red dwarf, python, tinker tailor/smiley’s people, yes minister, father ted [0] .. British tv is still producing great stuff.
It’s the “bureaucrats” in the bbc who are under threat from streaming. I’m not losing sleep!
[0] made in Britain; simply could not have been made in Ireland as was.
Here in Sweden the public service SVT has had its streaming service for years and I watch that more than I watch any of the commecial services I pay for (currently three of them).Incidentally that means mostly watching BBC (crime) series as SVT buy the rights to ridiculous numbers of those and many are very good. I would not mind if broadcast tv was shut down, but some older people would probably complain.
The UK is one of the few countries (among the countries with universal health care) that doesn't have a separate tax for health care. That means they can handle earmarking huge amounts of money for a public service out of the general taxation.
Why do they need to use this tv license thing for BBC then?
The licence was introduced when television sets were an exotic luxury so adding it to the tax rises used to pay for the NHS wasn't the obvious move for a Labour government. Radio licenses existed before the NHS or most other benefits were a thing.
As for why it hasn't been abolished like the radio licence... well any government that does that loses the ability to indirectly threaten it when they don't like the tone of the nation's most watched news channel by muttering darkly about how it's iniquitous funding model needs abolishing, and gets blamed for the changes people don't like.
> Why do they need to use this tv license thing for BBC then?
Even with horrendously massive cuts to public services and the Civil Service, the government has a tiny headroom in its budget, in the single-digit billions. The BBC cannot be funded from general taxation without the licence fee.
> The BBC cannot be funded from general taxation without the licence fee.
The question also is whether Ou want to directly pay it from taxes. Taxes fully depend on the current mood of the government. The fee does a bit of indirection limiting the direct influence.
> Taxes fully depend on the current mood of the government. The fee does a bit of indirection limiting the direct influence.
Yes. In fact, that was the whole point of various "arms length" bodies - publicly owned, but largely shielded from political influence. Of course, this government took a gleeful sledgehammer to that principle by abolishing NHS England and assuming direct control via the Ministry of Health. We'll see how many institutions will be similarly butchered in the remaining 4 years.
My wife and I agree that we would happily pay $400 a year to be able to use the iPlayer in the US. We are not alone. Just open up the TV license to anyone.
The US streaming giants seem to be doing a pretty good job of ensuring they themselves do not survive. Perhaps all British TV needs to do is wait out the enshittification that's already in play.
My thinking exactly. Got Netflix couple of years ago because of the Witcher and since then I'm finding it hard to find anything watchable. I was going to say that they heavily favor quantity over quality. But not even that is true, since their selection is rather limited. The search result "we don't have X, but you might like A, B, C" which are usually the same and unrelated things over and over, appears way too often.
What you describe is exactly how I felt about regular broadcast/cable. What you wanted to watch when you had time to watch might not have been on, so you channel surf until you find something. Maybe it was something you found interesting, or maybe you just got tired of surfing and just left it on whatever pissed you off the least. Very similar to doom scrolling a streaming platform’s listings where you realize you’ve just spent 15 minutes looking at the menu but not actually watching anything.
I think it's less commitment and more of just waving the flag and just putting something on to just be mindless and zone out for a bit. The mental exhaustion of scrolling through banal entry after banal entry of pablum content just wears on a person. It's definitely first world problems though. I've started to just hit the power button when I find myself in that state and finding something else to do. Even if it's just playing with the four legged roommates.
At least with YouTube you can end up in weird and interesting rabbit holes (I recommend “moving large things with trucks” and “blowing up buildings” and “railway snow clearing”). Sometimes you even learn something.
All the cable/Netflix slop ends up being basically the same story.
Netflix is far more robust and smarter than what you could ever strike them down for. These aren't people who just started a few weeks ago in the industry, and they are far from the people who are equally long lived dinosaurs who can't or won't keep up and dies in the past.
You're just not the target market anymore, and that's more than fine, because there's a few hundred million that are, and that number is growing, not shrinking, in fact they're growing faster than ever.
They’re still limited because they don’t have the budgets.
If you have a great script where are you going to take it? Netflix with a massive budget or the BBC / Channel 4 with a tiny one. Black mirror did not start on Netflix for example.
I’d pay more for bbc content than i do for Netflix or prime. It’s typically very good content that is strongly geo locked behind iplayer and you have to play whack a mole to get it…
I didn't realize it was this bad. Though, the last British TV show I consumed was Dr. Who, and I quit watching about the time Capaldi took the stage.
I cannot think of another show that I've watched... There was a David Tennant murder mystery show that was quite dark, but I didn't finish that one, either.
If you want quality it takes time and focus. Given how much content there is and how little free time we all have, the fact that traditional British TV shows stop when they're good rather than running any successful show into the ground is a point in their favour IMO.
'Traditional british tv' has produced some of the best shows to be ever made. The writing, acting and production quality of the 70s-80s classic british shows surpasses anything being produced these days in 4k. Spent so many delectable hours watching old shows from that era, some of them quite obscure. Modern shows feel like mass-produced in an assembly line, devoid of what one would call 'class'.
It's also produced some of the worst. Other channels and services have also produced some of the best and some of the worst. Because it's fairly subjective and there's no accounting for taste.
It feels a bit disingenous to compare a limited number of already very well known classic programs that have survived the test of time against the entire breadth of newer programs (of which there are vastly more in number, so the likelihood of even being seen is much lower).
this kind of take is usually the preserve of nostalgic old men who've just discovered YouTube comments, so I'm surprised to see it rephrased so many times here. if you aren't finding high quality modern British-made TV shows it's because you're not looking or you're unwilling to try new things. Wolf Hall, Line of Duty, Slow Horses, Rivals, Fleabag, Adolescence, Inside no 9, Veep, etc etc etc etc. I could name 10 more. TV is more stratified and yes there are a lot of worthless filler game shows and talk shows, but just as it was in the 70s and 80s, there are plenty of stand-out shows that will last the test of time
you're nitpicking. it's a high class, well-produced, well-acted, British-made TV show, by the BBC, of a very high quality that would be well-regarded in any era (if you ignore the weird racial thing they did in S2)
>Line of Duty
your opinion is absolutely in the minority, which isn't to say it's wrong, but it's a very well regarded, high class show that's widely seen as well above "decent procedural"
>Adolescence
whether it's liberal or paid for by Netflix is irrelevant to whether it's a high quality British-made tv show
>you haven't watched the others
then you're going to struggle to give a useful opinion on this matter, aren't you?
>Hardly in the class of historical Beeb
every historical BBC show you can name will have myriad minor subjective criticisms of the like you've just produced
>let alone contemporary US brilliance.
if you think US TV is even remotely comparable with UK TV, you're not paying attention. the US is long since out of its golden era, which pretty much died with Game of Thrones. US media has an order of magnitude more financial means than that of the UK, and yet what have they created of any real quality in the last few years besides White Lotus? they repeatedly fail to even remotely approach the class and quality of our TV. on the rare occasions they do get close, it's on the back of British actors or British production
> and yet what have they created of any real quality in the last few years besides White Lotus?
Now you’re just acting like the OP. There’s plenty of highly regarded us shows from the last few years. Just go look the highest rated current TV shows on rotten tomatoes.
well you're right. admittedly I haven't watched much recently besides White Lotus. on the other hand, it is true that most very highly regarded American shows have British actors in key roles, or creatives in production
I tried watching wolf hall because I love historical novels/shows, but I really struggled with it. Though I also struggled with the actual book so maybe it's something more fundamental.
Everyone dislikes some things. Not everyone likes classics such as Monty Python or Only Fools and Horses either. You're confusing "I don't like it" with "it's bad".
i think you'd find lots of people disagree. Were there some great BBC shows in the 70s and 80s? Sure.
I think you'd find lots pf people who find some relatively recent streaming shows to be amazing. You may not like them but there are many fans of shows like Stranger Things, The Crown, The Handmaid's Tale, The Queen's Gambit, Silo, Severance, Succession, ....
Feel this is a disingenuous question, as British TV will do just fine on streaming giants.
Just the BBC cannot and will not make them, and struggling to survive.
Hardly killed. I've been watching Doctor Who since the 1970s and there's been a lot of variation in quality over that time. I stopped watching it sometime around the Colin Baker era as I lost interest in it, but started watching it again with the Christopher Eccleston reboot. Then, I started getting disillusioned with the Peter Capaldi episodes - possibly the best actor for playing the Doctor, but given awful scripts (except "Heaven Sent" which is possibly the best ever episode). I struggled through Jodie Whittaker's seasons as I didn't like her portrayal nor the stories, but now I have to say that I really enjoy Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor even though there's been good and bad episodes of his.
I actively dislike Disney (except maybe TRON and the Black Hole), but I don't think they've killed Doctor Who.
I watched in the 70s too. But never got onboard with the Eccleston reboot.
There are no plans to make more Doctor Who, if it was good they would continue making more. So it's being shelved is probably a more an appropriate phrase.
Someone might take a chance again in several years.
> The Mirror reports that the series will return to BBC One for future series, with Russell T Davies already working on scripts for an additional two series, irrespective of whether Disney decide to continue in their partnership with the BBC beyond this series.
You're just moving the goalposts now; it didn't end until 2022, and what I was responding to was the suggestion that there's no inherent problem with British content, it just needs to be on modern streaming platforms: yes, and the BBC has also participated in that.
Top Gear with that trio ending wasn't a content problem, Clarkson punched a producer and was fired. You can say well that was a bad decision they should have valued keeping him at all costs etc., but there was no good solution there really, he was divisive well before that issue, if they kept him they'd have pleased fans and upset others. The show wasn't (immediately) axed; that probably quite reasonably seemed like the best compromise.
They can try making more of what people want and charging for it with ads. People liked The Office, Mr Bean, Doctor Who. The BBC can produce perfectly good telly if they want to be competitive. Don't be Canada and subsidize mediocrity and bad art with public money. Soft power should be earned, not bought and paid by public coffers.
We've banned this account – not only for this comment, it drew our attention to the comment history which includes several egregious comments, including some that are abusive towards other members of the community.
"In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile" is a good (modulo the horror of what he was doing) read. People were aware of his penchant for the young and his predatory nature in the mid-50s - almost a decade before he was on the BBC.
I like the beeb, but I don't watch it since I can only buy an annual licence and if they can afford to pay millions on individual presenters they don't need my money.
Bring in monthly subs and cap presenter salaries and I'll dip in from time to time.
I agree that they should let people subscribe monthly, but this is a completely illogical take. you might as well say you don't want to go to the cinema because the lead actor was paid the market rate for the job. if you don't like Gary Lineker, just say that, don't come out with this sideways attempt at nobility
Gary Lineker, the radio presenters, news readers. Fine if you're commercial but in no world is it justified to pay the likes of Huw Edwards £600k to read the news, then whinge about not having enough money as a public broadcaster.
"Oh, but if we don't pay them they'll leave"
Let them go! I'd happily read some words for a few hours each day for a mere £200k.
Footballers make 300k a week and no one complains. This is a post about the slim survival chances of British media.. well salary caps will be the nail in the coffin as talent will simply go whey get the best deal.
You're technically correct (the best kind of correct), but the TV license is very much like a tax as you're required to pay for it just for having equipment that can possibly receive broadcast TV.
this isn't true. you're required to pay for it if you watch live TV. you're perfectly allowed to have a TV or laptop or any other device that can pick up live TV
Sorry, I haven't checked the rules in a while. It used to be the case that owning a reception device required a license, but as you say, that's no longer the case.
Lol. They can call it a non-voluntary charitable donation. It doesn't matter what they call it. It's still a tax. You probably think "National Insurance" is not a tax.
You understand that what something is called is not always the same as what it is, right?
> Footballers make 300k a week and no one complains
To be fair, plenty of fans (and the occasional pundit) complain (and have been complaining for years) but unless the authorities get involved (FA, UEFA, FIFA, etc.) and implement proper financial controls (there's some coming in 2025/26 around player salaries but we also need controls on money coming from TV rights, self-sponsorships, etc.) with actual transparent penalties (they're still soft-pedalling City whilst kicking Everton and Forest), nothing will happen.
As an Everton fan I agree about city but I don’t think we should try and control these other things. You’re literally trying to limit the input (tv revenue) and output (salaries). If this happened countries that believe in a free market will outcompete and destroy the premier league which is one of the few things this country has going for it..
The best paid football players aren't easily replaced with cheaper talent though. Top clubs will need to compete against other top clubs, so e.g. a striker with better performance is going to be heavily in demand and can make a lot of difference to the success of the club.
Arguably, news readers aren't critical to the success of the news broadcast (the content probably makes far more difference), though I can see that presenters can make a big difference to the popularity of shows. I've got nothing against Gary Lineker (quite like him, but rarely watch him on telly), but I do object to being "forced" to pay for his excessive salary when they should be helping younger, unknown talent to get exposure etc.
The world we live in, apparently, since they're getting that much money to do those jobs as we speak. Might as well complain about executive pay and the Royal estates while you're at it.
I completely agree with and understand this reaction to people like Huw Edwards being paid stupid amounts of money to read words off a screen while managing the colossal task of simultaneously looking concerned, doing a serious voice, and not vomiting or getting their nipples out. I personally think that BBC News should just be disbanded or spun off into a separate entity, because otherwise one day it will bring the whole institution down with it. reading the news is a genuinely low-skill job that could be done by literally anyone with a few weeks of training
however, I think you're very wrong to include the presenting of entertainment and educational shows with that. presenting these shows well is something that requires a genuine art. if news presenters wages were capped, nothing significant would change. if entertainment presenters wages were capped, there'd be a huge talent drain and shows would become worse in quality, giving a massive advantage to the generally awfully produced commercial channels that make lower quality content interspersed with brainrot fucking adverts and phone in quiz competitions
You can cancel your TV licence part of the way through a year and get a refund if you’ve paid in advance. It’s not as easy as cancelling a streaming service though.
You’re misreading. No need to move in to a care home.
You can cancel your TV licence at a monthly interval and give the reason “I no longer watch [UK broadcast] TV on any channel or service, or use BBC iPlayer.”
If you pay for the whole year in advance you can apply for a refund for unused months.
It is a propaganda outfit (and was from inception). It has special legislation to force TV owners to pay - this tax is called the 'license fee'. In the past only people who had been 'cleared' could work there.
While people think that the UK's recent legislation is dystopian, the reality is it was ever thus as we see with the bbc. I would be very glad to see it go, but that won't happen because - it's utility as a megaphone to the governance system remains very high.
Like it or not, the BBC is the world's oldest public broadcaster; a pioneer in many ways. For the UK, there's a huge amount of prestige in that. Naturally, the BBC as an entity needs to preserve British values. Conservatism and political correctness doesn't automatically entail "lying" or propaganda.
The BBC that you see in the rest of the world is very much not the BBC you see in England. The English BBC is surprisingly myopic and totally fits the charge of propaganda.
Last time I watched BBC it was the news in the morning before work aboit ten years ago, I was lectured about black excellence and white fragility. Vile institution.
I do not know why you are being downvoted - there is some hyperbole in your comment but your link (to the BBC itself!) is shocking and certainly justifies calling it a lying institution.
I do not think it is as dystopian as recent legislation. It did not intrude into our private lives!
the comment is being downvoted because its central premise is preposterous: the BBC lied about vetted people for MI5 30 years ago -> therefore it's a lying propaganda institution -> therefore it should be disbanded
first of all, even if MI5 vetting for this kind of thing wasn't a completely reasonable precaution--read Spycatcher if you don't know why--do you think the BBC had a choice in matters?
second, this was 30 years ago.
third, if we're going to just disband any institution that's silently beholden to MI5, you may as well abandon the whole country.
fourth, the BBC makes a metric tonne of fantastic content enjoyed by people all over the world, and yet somehow it should be disbanded for trying to keep soviet spies out over 30 years ago?
people just love to hate the BBC, egged on by the cowardly, self-interested right-wing media, and it's just sad, because it's genuinely one of the truly great things about the country. it's our greatest artistic cultural achievement by a long distance
> even if MI5 vetting for this kind of thing wasn't a completely reasonable precaution--read Spycatcher if you don't know why--do you think the BBC had a choice in matters?
There is always a choice. People could have refused, resigned, spoken out.
> second, this was 30 years ago.
Short enough for people who were complicit in it to be decisionmakers now.
> if we're going to just disband any institution that's silently beholden to MI5, you may as well abandon the whole country.
They need to be rooted out. They and their ilk are the entities that actually subverted the country. We used to have principles and care about them, or at least pretend to.
> the BBC makes a metric tonne of fantastic content enjoyed by people all over the world, and yet somehow it should be disbanded for trying to keep soviet spies out over 30 years ago?
The BBC commissions some great content from great creators - as do all British TV channels. If you look at what the BBC itself does, there's a lot of bad there.
read Spycatcher. in the post-war/cold war era, Britain, particularly the upper classes, was fucking riddled with soviet agents, mostly British-born communist sympathisers who were activated by the USSR, and many of them could have been stopped from doing huge damage if simple vetting had been in place
this isn't mccarthyite nonsense, this isn't right-wing hatred for communism. I am a socialist. this is the absolute fact that a foreign power was actively, successfully pushing agents into positions in the establishment all over the country. do you think it's a coincidence the vetting stopped when the soviet union collapsed?
>The BBC commissions some great content from great creators - as do all British TV channels. If you look at what the BBC itself does, there's a lot of bad there.
do you genuinely believe that ITV, Dave, Channel 5, Sky, etc are producing or have ever produced content on par with the BBC?
Channel 4 is the only other channel that can even remotely compete, and I would imagine they too would have been equally under MI5's thumb if they'd been important enough to warrant it. going further, do you really think that any British TV channel would have spoken out if MI5 came to them and told them they needed to vet their employees as a matter of national security? even further, has any organisation ever done that in the history of MI5? in the global history of spy agencies?
I'm not going to read a whole book to respond to an internet comment, especially when it sounds like it's from someone with vested interests very much on one side.
> in the post-war/cold war era, Britain, particularly the upper classes, was fucking riddled with soviet agents, mostly British-born communist sympathisers who were activated by the USSR, and many of them could have been stopped from doing huge damage if simple vetting had been in place
What "huge damage" was done? Britain was if anything doing better for itself in that era, and the USSR's success record speaks for itself.
> do you think it's a coincidence the vetting stopped when the soviet union collapsed?
No, of course not, that removed the funding and the excuse, as well as laying bare the complete failure of the intelligence establishment to accomplish anything useful (given that they'd been unable to see it coming).
this is genuinely fascinating. your viewpoint is that you want the BBC to be disbanded because they didn't reveal anti-soviet vetting 30 years ago, anti-soviet vetting you don't support because you actually don't mind there having been soviet spies, because the USSR had a great "success record" and the UK was more socialist at the time?
and you clearly knew this when you wrote your original comment? which leads me to the conclusion that your original comment was written as some kind of bizarre attempt at soviet apologism through an angle of attacking the BBC
how insanely odd and anachronistic. honestly, well done for maintaining such ideological rigidity for this long, I'm genuinely not-sarcastically impressed. it's like you woke up from a 30+ year coma
> people just love to hate the BBC, egged on by the cowardly, self-interested right-wing media, and it's just sad, because it's genuinely one of the truly great things about the country. it's our greatest artistic cultural achievement by a long distance
Sadly, lying for decades to everyone is indeed Britain's greatest artistic cultural achievement.
then hide yourself in a cave and never come out because everyone lies and everything lies and the world is built on lies
name an institution as large and wide and old as the BBC that hasn't told far more lies for far less honourable reasons than defending against soviet espionage
of course you can love it or not love it, but I'd make my decision based on whether you enjoy its content rather than on what MI5 made them do during the cold war
You don't think that it intruded into private lives, but I would disagree. If only certain information/ideas/programs are aired, you don't know what you don't know. You are not able to make informed decisions with only partial information. An institution such as the BBC operating without any push back for decades would be capable of directing culture and society, in an artificial way.
It is funny to hear the US M5M declared "right wing" - it just isn't true. Right now broadcasters are in a bit of a minefield. Viewership is down, most broadcast stations are owned by a couple of companies, and rumor has it the administration may ban pharmaceutical advertising on television (which won't have teeth unless they explicitly ban native advertising). The pharma ads bankroll most mainstream media in the US, billions a year. (Note, I worked at one of the largest media empires in the US and watched the internal livestreams of the advertiser banquets)
And most pharma ads are not aimed at you and I, it's aimed at medical providers. That's how lucrative pharma marketing is for pharma.
And I completely disagree with your claim that all media is propaganda. Propaganda is a word that is defined. So I'll chalk that up to hyperbole. As in: if my objective is to make a nice song that people tap their feet to, is that propaganda because it has an objective? If so, then the word "propaganda" is diluted to the point of meaninglessness. You may as well say "all media is media."
It has already pretty much died, and I don't think it was by the hand of streaming. It was whatever process put a stop to new shows in the template of the really great shows we had in the past. At some point the risk taking stopped and everything just became the same drudge. Of course, there was always plenty of drudge.
It was the comedies that were particularly good and very British. Some were very unusual and bizarre, the late night shows. But they were also where writers and comedians got a break and then became mainstream. I would guess that kind of thing is now made for the internet, and its a shame to see everything go so niche.
An article I came across a couple of years ago (wish I could find it!) talked about how there was this period of time when British TV started to diversify the source of talent, around the 80s and 90s. You got shows like Red Dwarf where the cast were not all from the same small set of drama schools. But it has now reverted and that kind of low budget, take a chance show doesn't get shown on the main channels.
I think this is survivorship bias to a large degree.
Sturgeon's Law applied then as it does now; 90% of everything is crud. Go back 20-30 years, and the shows you remember as great are only a tiny fraction of the total output. Some (like Monty Python or Brass Eye) were extreme outliers.
Some shows seen as notable at the time are now mostly, though not always fairly, forgotten because they haven't aged well. Nobody's really watching, I don't know, The Onedin Line or Against the Wind today.
> Sturgeon's Law applied then as it does now; 90% of everything is crud. Go back 20-30 years, and the shows you remember as great are only a tiny fraction of the total output. Some (like Monty Python or Brass Eye) were extreme outliers.
I want to back up and support this point: just pull up a list of shows on Wikipedia from any TV channel you can remember, ideally one with a long history and just go through the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s etc. You're going to find a lot more cream the further forward you go into the future, and maybe, depending on the channel and your own personal tastes, a drop off in the last 10 to 15 years. Most TV was just bad, but old TV especially. For every "All in the Family" or "Cosby Show" or "The Wire" or "Frasier"; or to make this more British: "Sherlock", "Doctor Who", "Monty Python's Flying Circus", there's just dozens upon dozens of terrible shows. They each had their audiences, the ones that weren't cancelled (and even some of the ones that were), but it's like, nobody remembers the dirt underneath the flower, but they remember the flowers that they liked.
I would argue Monty python is in fact not an exception. Their best sketches are just outstanding, but their median sketches are very unfunny indeed.
The actual exception is e.g. the life of Brian where you have 90 minutes where almost every scene is funny or at least engaging. Compare with e.g. the holy grail where the best 90% is quite good but the rest is... Not...
I think this misses the broader point of how revolutionary they were. They were hugely original and experimental, breaking with a lot of comedy conventions and redefining them. They've been compared to The Beatles for good reason. They were never the same kind of worldwide phenomenon, but they were equally influential.
We were talking about ratio of good stuff to bad stuff.
Sure. They may have had their misses, but the Pythons were exceptional. A classic TV show, two fantastic movies (plus a flawed one), a live stage show that's become a classic — they were among the best of their era, and we're still talking about them.
That’s kind of what “experimental” means though - it isn’t an experiment if you know the results in advance.
> At some point the risk taking stopped and everything just became the same drudge.
Same for all the big name movies these days, everyone is too scared to take a chance on something truly new. If you want a novel movie experience you basically have to look towards foreign films, often the more arty types (which I love
On the topic of TV though just consider this for a moment, we lived in a world where someone was daring enough to air "Paedogeddon!" (a Brass Eye special that imo is an excellent work of satire) on TV. Something so controversial couldn't be made and aired today and it was barely able to be even back then.
From Matt Lucas himself regarding Little Britain:
'Speaking in October 2017, Lucas stated that if he were to remake Little Britain he would avoid making jokes about transvestites and would not play the role of a black character, saying, "Basically, I wouldn't make that show now. It would upset people. We made a more cruel kind of comedy than I'd do now... Society has moved on a lot since then and my own views have evolved".'
Basically the risk taking has gone in modern comedy.
Little Britain just hasn’t aged well. The sketches were always more about repetition than wit, relied on caricature a lot and mistook shock value for satire.
You couldn’t make Little Britain today mostly because it wasn’t very good, and the standards of the time were lower.
You could absolutely remake The Day Today, Brass Eye, Goodness Gracious Me or Peep Show today and they’d be just as good.
I think Little Britain kicked downwards.
I really distasted it when it was running.
I agree, it’s often held up as a “risk taking” show but I don’t think it wasn’t really anything of the sort.
At the moment post 1997 when Britain was starting to change and become more diverse and sure of it itself it reinforced an identify of Britain as it used to think of itself: silly voices, binary identities and oddballs.
It has more in common with Love Thy Neighbour than anything that came after.
The contrast to Monthy Python's take is quite stark.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jF-CkMpQtlY&pp=ygUUdmlsbGFnZSB...
Yeah, that whole era of things like the Jimmy Carr gameshows were honestly a sort of mass nastiness as entertainment.
This business where we're all supposed to be surprised by what Russell Brand was up to despite him being incredibly open about it at the time is the same thing: society wants to blame the highly visible individuals of that era but in truth it was the audience that wanted this stuff that were the problem.
You could barely make Brass Eye in 2001, as their 2001 special proved, never mind today. And you absolutely wouldn't get away with Goodness Gracious Me.
> You could barely make Brass Eye in 2001, as their 2001 special proved,
I still hold that special up as one of the best pieces of satire to ever air on TV, but at the same time I'm shocked it was ever able to be produced and shown since it satirizes the one topic above all others you aren't "allowed" to joke about.
For those interested I highly recommend watching it: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6shgvw
The episode was also made at a time when it was fashionable to hold the view that the country was gripped by a kind of irrational hysteria about child sexual abuse. Monkey Dust's 'pedofinder general', from around the same time period, reflects a similar attitude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCywGhHQMEw
Decades later this all looks rather naive. The BBC, especially, could hardly make a program satirizing exaggerated concerns about child sexual abuse, given that the Savile scandal proved that many such concerns had in fact been taken nowhere near seriously enough.
Their "Paedogeddon" special would have been highly controversial in any time and was also far beyond what they did before. Do you really think it could have been made in the 70s or 80s?
I've seen a few Instagram reels of folks remaking Peep Show for 2025, it works ridiculously well.
Chris Morris made a career, early on, of getting fired for stuff he did on air. Not many people would risk that.
It's aged perfectly fine but this infantile and maoist-like philosophy shouldn't.
A lot of comedy back then was about laughing at the absurdities of a shared life.
The absurdities of yesterday have been changed - and there can be no actual normality today when there are no absurdities. Laughing at absurdities was not considered cruel.
With no common shared understanding of what's funny or not. Today we can laugh at cruel people only. The cruel and those who think others are weird are the strange ones.
Comedy used to be "look at us, hahaha" now it's "look at them, heh". Real comedy has truth and the truth is always about ourselves not some external other. But such vulnerability is very risky.
There's an interview with Bob Monkhouse about making TV in the 50s/60s; he wasn't allowed to say "condom" on TV, and would get fined if he said "bloody".
There's as always a "taboo" on some things. Lots of jokes about sex and religion today that would see you completely crucified in the past. Do you think The Thick of It could have been made in the 80s?
I never cared for Little Britain and haven't seen it, so I can't comment on their "jokes about transvestites", but this whining about "PC gone mad!" has been going on for 40+ years. A few decades ago it was about "you can't make fun of the pakis and nig-nogs any more!"
I suspect the same number of people were upset in 2006 as would be upset in 2017. But there wasn't a social media platform for those upset views to be expressed and easily measured.
This idea of "oh everyone is offended these days" is a bit weird to me; the 'these days' part I mean. There was a lot of comedy from the past that was... awkward to me as a kid, or just... felt unnecessarily cruel. But I was in a minority, or at least felt like it, with some of those. And... I don't think I changed, but I now can hear/read about others who share the same sensibilities on comedic topics.
The notion that it's somehow "more" people getting "offended" today just strikes me as odd. It may be that as more folks have a platform to share their views, that influences some folks, but I'm not sure that works on all topics. Certainly... on comedy, I've heard many of complaints about some comics/topics. Rarely has anyone's view of a comedy bit made me change my position. If I found it cringe/bad, I found it cringe/bad.
During my childhood it were always the Christian conservatives who try to ban video games or get outraged when they say half a nipple on TV.
back in days you'd just be "allowed" to make fun out of minorities with them not being able to fight back. now you aren't, and thus the majorities are "oppressed" and everything is "politically correct".
i'm bi. sometimes I watch old Polish comedies or standups. The amount of "jokes" that are just good old bigotry is stupendous.
so when people say they're tired of "political correctness", I do wonder if they mean - I am no longer allowed to be bigot openly, why can't I kick those who I consider to be below me.
People made fun of others and themselves. Now it's only okay to "punch up" which makes things unfunny. It's great you can make fun of religion well only one religion but the rules constrain novel ideas that push outside of those rules to make actual humor. Tell me something I haven't heard before with some truth.
The repeated going back to the well makes everything unfunny. The first time a Polish joke was said was in Poland many Polish watching laughed because their was kernel of truth that made it funny but years later hearing it repeated like it's gospel makes it awful because people have changed but the joke doesn't so it doesn't land as true anymore. Once we start looking why the joke is untrue instead of why it's true the joke is dead.
Saturday night live always tries to go back to a joke that was never really that funny.
Well, looks like in some countries at least open bigotry and discrimination have a comeback.
My son is a teenager but loves to watch old politically incorrect comedies like "Airplane". There's no way you could make that movie today... but there's certainly a market for it, cruel or not.
Now that I think about it, it's no more cruel than what most kids watch on YouTube today.
Airplane could be made today, the central premise would hold up well, some of the skits in it would have to be dropped or altered. Most things that were made in one period could not be made whole cloth in another period.
There is an airplane movie from this year! No idea if it can hold up to the old ones and I don't have time to watch movies these days: Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt34956433/
You think they'd do the jive bit (or an equivalent)? Closest I'd expect would be gen whatever slang with the yeeting sigmas to Ohio etc.
There are tons of dialects and accents and group slang that the joke could be done with. Doing basic generational slang would likely flop, but you could easily use something like a thick accent from Texas like Boomhower in King of the Hill, or a Louisiana Creole accent, or some deep Appalacian accent, or some Spanglish.
I think either way it would be unfunny because
1) jive isn’t something many people have encountered nowadays and
2) “internet slang is incomprehensible” is an overdone joke.
1 is why I said or an equivalent - you could do the same with pidgin or any creole or, I don't know if this is a PC way to say it, but any kind of 'hood' or 'ghetto' type slang. The joke is just person is 'fluent' in an unlikely dialect/way of speaking. If cockney rhyming slang were more prevalent you could do that, with you know a black American or Asian person or whatever being the unlikely fluent one.
2 is is not really the point, sure it could flop, my point was just that I couldn't imagine it going further than that, not that that would be funny.
>Airplane could be made today, the central premise would hold up well, some of the skits in it would have to be dropped or altered.
In other words, not Airplane!.
and to say what I said before, hardly any movie that was made in one generation can be made in another. There will always be things that have to be changed. This same thing applies to basically every other work of art - despite the valiant efforts of Pierre Menard.
The protagonist with Vietnam flashbacks would obviously have to be altered, you couldn't have skits about Ronald Reagan - nobody knows who he is, nor do they know who Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is.
Having the autopilot smoking after being inflated doesn't make sense in a world where barely anyone smokes.
It's been a few years since I watched Airplane, and while I absolutely love it, I recall it being rather tame even by modern standards. I can think of a few gags that might not land as well today, but I don't think it was mean-spirited.
"Oh, stewardess! I speak jive" would absolutely get you cancelled today. I don't think it's mean-spirited either but that's not enough to save you these days.
Black man uses heavy black slang isn't an offensive joke. They sound cool.
When I watched it recently the joke that kinda flops is the heavily stereotyped gay man. Whether it is offensive I have no idea. Its not flattering.
> Black man uses heavy black slang isn't an offensive joke. They sound cool.
Sure, the old white woman using heavy black slang is where the joke comes in.
In Blindspotting (2018), a white protagonist is shown as being able to fluently speak an incomprehensibly dense version of AAVE, and it’s revealed later he has no idea what he’s saying (despite communicating effectively). I’ve never seen anyone criticize that joke.
The first time without her is funny though too
I don't get it does that make her a racist or something? She tries to help.
The joke is: their slang is so heavy its another language.
Personally make fun of zoomers all the time for this.
change jive to aave and I think the joke works pretty similar now? just needs modern slang
There’s a sequel to Naked Gun coming out soon, starring Liam Neeson. Whether it’ll be any good or do well at the box office is a different question.
You could absolutely make airplane today. It just depends who does it and some people may attack it but who the hell cares.
not in Hollywood, is what I think the poster meant, due to the political sickness that has infected them as of late.
Airplane is mostly physical humor and dumb wordplay. 90% of the jokes would be fine as-is. There are a few you'd have to update, but that's hardly surprising for a movie released 35 years ago. You could have said the same in 1980 about most comedies made in 1945.
the scene of the arabs walking into the airport with RPGs and machine guns wouldn't make the cut.
Are you talking about this scene from Airplane 2? I don't remember a scene with 'Arabs' going through security in the first one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meFJCeUWDyY
we're both right|wrong
- no, I was wrong that the person passing thru security was in any possible way "arab"
- yes it's from Airplane 2
- No it's not from the metal detector scene
- Yes it's from Iranians
- No Iranians are not "arabs"
- Yes They are engaged in a stereotypical crime
- No it doesn't involve an RPG
- yes it involves a battle rifle / something that doesn't belong at an airport
https://postimg.cc/0rTzkhyR
> Basically the risk taking has gone in modern comedy.
As if the only kind of risk you could take is punching down at trans and black people.
That’s what you got from the quote? Not the part about being cruel?
Yes i did... The risk of being cruel, and other things.
Cruel against whom?
Cruelty against the already marginalized is an easy target.
Kicking downwards is easy.
Little Britain was always crap and completely mainstream and non-edgy. It's a series of one joke sketches based on familiar stereotypes. I don't want to 'cancel' it, and the occasional sketch gets a titter out of me. But to hold it up as an example of edgy, groundbreaking comedy is quite absurd. You can find oodles of much edgier and funnier shows on British TV today.
Yeah, none of that was what was funny about little Britain... and I think you missed the point.
Comparing all programming in the 80s and 90s to current programming is going to throw up more “hits” for the multi-decade time range than the contemporary.
There are a few other comments listing them all. The uk has lots of high quality novel shows coming out every year. Our tv export market is strong, both for programming and for formats.
It's not just the time range that's the issue with that comparison. Older shows had less competition and had a longer time to develop a cult following.
Probably too recent, but any chance it was this? https://www.voicemag.uk/blog/14186/red-dwarf-diversity-in-sp...
No, it was longer and wasn't concentrated on red dwarf. It started on the casting for Sherlock.
Red Dwarf. Low budget yet still enjoyable today. I recall reading the SFX were done on an Amiga with something called a VideoToaster.
Are you perhaps thinking of Babylon 5?
But yes, the low budget is part of the formula for success. Without a ton of money, they had to rely on wit and creativity. Most shows now have comparatively gargantuan budgets, and it goes on big sets, big effects and big names, but the things that actually make a show good (compelling story, enjoyable writing) are unbottleable magic that you can’t just buy.
I definitely meant Red Dwarf but another person pointed out that the show originally didn't use VFX.
Red Dwarf used practical effects in the era when VideoToasters were a thing. For some reason the BBC replaced the lovely miniature shots of space ships with crap CG in a mid-2000s remaster.
VideoToasters were a thing but they didn’t work with PAL, at at least not the original version.
I agree that the models looked better IMHO.
They did it with models. They then rereleased some of the earlier shows with CGI, demonstrating how much better it was with models.
Would anyone like some toast? Muffin? Teacake? Buns? Baps? Baguette? Bagel? Crumpet? Pancake? Flapjack? Waffle?
I find it interesting that you mention red dwarf. As I started reading your comment I thought I'd comment something "i think that's just nostalgia, for example red dwarf is awful but people love it". And then you mention red dwarf.
Eye of the beholder. I personally think Red Dwarf series 1 to 6 was great. It even charts a course of British TV decline. Series 1 and 2, low budget sitcom, class warfare and the loneliness of space. Series 3, more budget, more sci-fi, but similar writing. Series 4 and 5, more budget, more sci-fi, becomes monster of the week, but the character building from the prior series keeps it funny. Series 6, even more budget, they start to explore some more interesting sci-fi themes. This turns out to be popular, so it gets more budget again and moves to BBC 1, more cast etc. Series 7, 8 just urgh, trying to appeal to "mainstream" was stupid because it was already popular enough, it loses the serious side. Everything they've done since then feels like they're trying to force the humour that came naturally before. The actors have aged but the writing didn't mature with them.
I watched some interviews with the cast and they would joke around in the canteen between filming and find their jokes had been overheard and incorporated into the script. It had this realistic dialogue.
Personally I thought seasons 11 and 12 were excellent. Substantially better than the other season 7+ / post Rob Grant departure stuff.
And then after season 12, The Promised Land movie was just ok, but it still had a few genuinely funny moments.
It isn’t just comedies - there used to be a plethora of interesting documentaries produced by the beeb, to the extent that for a while they had a channel (BBC 4) pretty much dedicated to them. I used to be able to find something interesting on there any day of the week, and likewise, iPlayer held a great catalogue of content. BBC 4 was slated to be axed a few years ago, first thing on the chopping block. They seem to be stuck in decision paralysis, which is absolutely emblematic of what faces them.
While the BBC still produce documentaries, the quality has declined over the last decade or so, and when Attenborough dies they will be fresh out of ideas, as right now it’s just… Attenborough, and licensed human interest pieces.
I just can’t see it being a thing in 10, 20 years, as they surmise - I would wager they will whittle away until all that remains is BBC News, which will run on a shoestring, even more than it does now.
> BBC 4 was axed a few years ago
No it was not. BBC Four is still going strong. It's great.
Ok, fine, they decided to axe broadcast services and move it to be online only - but this discussion is about broadcast TV.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-61591674
They haven't moved it online. Find a TV and switch it on - BBC Four is still there, for now at least!
https://ukfree.tv/channels/all/Freeview
I've noticed this a lot with anti-BBC folks. They have some ideological issue with it but that isn't a popular position so they go for more niche arguments like "The entire historical catalogue isn't fully available to watch on demand" or "They axed BBC <insert number> from broadcast". Arguments they don't actually care about. It's just a way to snipe at the BBC.
As you've pointed out, if someone loves being able to watch BBC Four on broadcast TV, they're not going to be complaining about it's non existent axing.
I’m very pro BBC - but they reached their apogee in the early 2000s and have been in a state of steady decline since.
Yet you know nothing about it.
The problem is that BBC Four now only shows archive material (with occasional exceptions as "overflow capacity" from sports events etc.) whereas they used to commission their own documentaries.
Basically none of this is true.
Whatever happens, they need to decriminalise the license fee.
"Almost a third of women’s convictions are for not paying the TV licence fee, figures have revealed.
Women are ten times more likely to be convicted for not paying the £157.50 annual fee than men – with growing numbers of women then being slapped with criminal records, Ministry of Justice data shows."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/tv-licence-f...
this modern style of criticism is so tiring. if you philosophically disagree with something, don't try to abuse the defence of an oppressed group as a rhetorical technique to make it harder for people to argue with you, just say you disagree with it and why
even if you genuinely believe this is why it should be decriminalised, if women are being disproportionally affected, then clearly either there's some kind of bias in the process, which should simply be fixed instead of disbanding the whole process, or women are simply less skilled at dealing with situations like this and need more help. either way it's not an issue with the concept of the license fee
I actually don't disagree that the license fee in its current format is a problem, ideally it should just be impossible to access it without having paid, but I don't think it's feasible with the way freeview works
Anecdotal, but out of my family I’m the only man who doesn’t pay the licence fee, and the only person who hasn’t had a visit.
They’ve visited my mother, sister and one auntie that don’t pay - they all live alone and are the sole name on the bill.
I’ve heard from friends similar experiences too, single men and households with men on the electoral register don’t get visits, or very rarely if they do.
I had the pleasure of answering the door at my mothers to one of these people and believe there’s an issue with the way they choose who to investigate. It’s predatory.
Suspect more obvious factors are that men are far less likely to be home during the daytime when inspectors visit, and also more likely to admit they've had a TV for years or let the inspector in if he asks nicely...
(FWIW I'm had a visit shortly after I'd moved in with five other guys before, and avoided prosecution by simply asking how to pay...)
I suspect it's more likely that the inspectors see women as a soft touch and lower risk and more easily intimidated and less prone to violence.
In the same way ticket inspectors on trains ask people in suits for tickets but avoid asking the 6ft tall roadmen.
This is my theory. My relatives wouldn’t have a clue whether they were lying about being some official inspector and saying they’re allowed to inspect, and they would probably be scared of either an official looking, or bailiff looking person telling them this.
i'm beginning to think i'm the only one that DOES pay it.
I don't pay it because I don't watch television anymore, live or otherwise.
However I do find the overreach of claiming I need to pay the license if I watch any form of live broadcast is ridiculous. If I wanted to watch the occasional live stream of a football game online via Amazon Prime then I would need to pay the license fee.
that's too far, agreed, although I would be extremely shocked if anyone has been prosecuted for that
People are prosecuted for this with zero evidence other than an ‘admission’, with the admission being as nebulous as ‘yeah the tv is on’.
How can you prove someone was watching TV in court? As far as I’m aware you can’t, but the court sides with Capita generally. Please don’t bring up the TV detecting vans as evidence.
none of this is evidence anyone has been prosecuted for watching live football from a streaming service
It’s not really a topic of conversation that I’d bring up, but I know many people who do pay it so you aren’t the only one.
I don’t because I don’t use anything that requires me to, not from a moral standpoint. The BBC has given me a lot of fantastic content over the years but I’ve just stopped consuming most television over the past 5 years or so.
No, I do too, and I’m happy to do so. I’ve always felt it’s a useful brake on over-commercialisation of other channels, although perhaps less effective now than it once was. I do enjoy quite a bit of the BBC’s output as well.
I feel there's a huge problem in this debate, which is that the people who don't like it are extremely vocal, and the people who do like it and quietly use and enjoy it without necessarily adoring it, perhaps like you, who I suspect are a majority, are just not really represented in the conversation, and the people who love it, like me, do not really have a central reference point from which to draw power from unlike the people who don't like it, who have the entire right-wing media crowing about it at every opportunity
You might be underrating my ardour on this as I've said my piece at greater length before.
I've always been in favour of (something like) the license fee to fund a non-commercial national public service broadcaster. Public service broadcasting is incredibly important otherwise it's all just commercial interests and you end up with the kind of nonsense you get in the TV landscape in the USA: low quality content, far too many ads, dominance of hyper-partisan "news", etc.
And if you look at what the BBC does - the TV channels, iPlayer, the national radio stations, local radio, news, the world service, the ground-breaking content they've created over the decades, and of course licensing/reselling content - it's incredibly impressive and, to me at any rate, represents incredibly good value for money as compared to other providers.
The TV license costs about the same as an annual Netflix subscription but the BBC is able to do so much more with that money than Netflix are. Doesn't even compare in my mind.
agreed on every point
Not to mention the people who are extremely vocal about how horrible and woke it is for having too many minorities and that Mr Lineker also overlaps heavily with people who have watched it continuously for 50 years, wouldn't dream of switching over to newfangled channels like Channel 4 and don't know what an Amazon is...
I think I'm one of those, minus the last bit about channel 4 and Amazon.
perhaps there needs to be an inquiry into the issue
I doubt Capita would have any fallout from an inquiry, it would be another headline for a day or two then get forgotten by the media. I’m all for it though, they should be held accountable, my first statement is purely cynicism from me.
depends who the government is really. I'd be cautiously optimistic that the current government would do something about it, ideally taking it out of the hands of a private company in the first place. this government is too nervous for that kind of thing, but I do think they could do something about it.
That’s got me thinking, who controls that? Do the BBC willingly employ Capita to enforce the licence, or are they mandated to enforce it in some way and Capita just so happen to be the vultures that were cheapest to hire?
I have no idea but my guess is that it's handled privately so that no one at the BBC has to get their hands mucky
> if women are being disproportionally affected, then clearly either there's some kind of bias in the process, which should simply be fixed instead of disbanding the whole process, or women are simply less skilled at dealing with situations like this and need more help
Or they're more comfortable breaking that particular law (under the same conditions). I'm not saying that _is_ the case, but it is one of the possibilities.
It’s right there in the article:
>The ministry’s report admits the chief reason why so many women wind up being prosecuted is because they are more likely to open the door to inspectors.
Men literally or figuratively tell the inspectors to fuck off, women don’t. It’s not bias, systemic issues, or whatever. It’s entirely on how women handle the situation that explains the difference.
Right, but the post I was responding to was listing out reasons that women might be prosecuted more, including being targeted more. So, unless you mean that they are targeted more _because_ they are more likely to open the door to inspectors, my point stands.
They need to figure it a different way to do enforcement that’s not as discriminatory. The current approach leads to disparate outcomes and is therefore inherently discriminatory
It's not necessarily discriminatory just because it winds up impacting one group more than another.
For example, if you have 2 groups of people and one of the groups is doing something wrong twice as much, and you enforce the law on everyone... it's fair, not discriminatory. (Ignoring the fact that what is labelled "wrong" can be done in such a way as to be discriminatory. I'm assuming a neutral view of what is wrong )
> I actually don't disagree that the license fee in its current format is a problem, ideally it should just be impossible to access it without having paid, but I don't think it's feasible with the way freeview works
So you think that it should just be privatised like netflix. If you don't think public service broadcasting has a place, just don't try to hide it.
I think if you knew me you would know that I am the absolute last person who wants to privatise the BBC. the privatisation of the BBC would be the end of my world. I think the public ownership of the BBC, and the BBC in general is the greatest cultural achievement of modern Britain.
I just think that instead of making it so that people can fuck up and not pay by accident or by laziness, it would be better if there was no way for that to happen. it has nothing to do with public vs private ownership
I don't get the TV license model myself. I think a government should collect taxes and provide services without adding elaborate schemes to pretend something else is happening.
the point is that it partially takes it out of the hands of the government of the day. if it were solely funded by taxes, it would be long since dead or privatised by now, and if it weren't it would be entirely beholden to pleasing the government. maybe in a more mature country it could work, but not here
I think the license fee, with a couple of tweaks, could be absolutely ingenious. the best of both worlds. the freedom of choice of the free market, and the lack of commercialism of the public sector, and no one has to pay taxes for it. however, it does restrict user choice somewhat by forcing them to pay for it to watch any live tv, even football on streaming platforms. I think there could be a discussion to be had about changing it to where users pay just to watch the BBC and not live tv in general
If you want to change it to a BBC subscription fee, then you're just changing the BBC into Netflix. The whole point of the BBC is that everyone pays and everyone can benefit - same as the NHS, or libraries, or roads.
I think the only way that change could work while protecting the BBCs editorial independence and maintain its public service remit would be to have it as part of council tax. A £160 a year charge on a band D house (with appropriate discounts for Band A-C and excess for E-H). The default amount would be set as the license fee is now.
that's not the point of the BBC whatsoever, otherwise it would just be a tax like everything else publicly owned. it's precisely the opposite in fact. it's voluntary
It's never been changed to a direct tax to prevent direct interference from the government
The BBC has an obligation to serve everyone, not just subscribers. Netflix has an obligation to serve subscribers, at least well enough that they don't leave.
>It's never been changed to a direct tax to prevent direct interference from the government
that's half of the reason, and also feeds into the other reason. if it's not a direct tax and it's semi-voluntary it's harder for people to criticise as unfair. not that they don't find a way
>The BBC has an obligation to serve everyone, not just subscribers. Netflix has an obligation to serve subscribers, at least well enough that they don't leave.
this is an intrinsic property of Netflix being a private business, not Netflix being a subscription service. the BBC could comfortably move to a subscription model and still have the exact same ethos. the BBC's payment model is not so different from a subscription model that right now a private company would be serving license fee payers rather than everyone in general
Seems like an awful lot for TV, and where most of the friction in the custom design is for the public.
All the other areas that republic misdesign hits have much larger budgets and much more corruption, but those topics are a bit harder for the public to engage with so a special program does very nicely at preventing any system corrections.
I enjoy the way you think and phrase your thoughts (are you on ketamine?), but I think that publicly-owned broadcasting, particularly (exclusively) the entertainment side of things, is the opposite of republic misdesign. it's a freak accident of something very very positive and joyful and broadly selfless rising above the waves of self-interest and corruption and misery.
I think the news part of the BBC should be removed, maybe spun off into a separate entity
I think you misunderstood my sub-point.. I think we both agree about the BBC as a wonderful result. I question the motives for a special system of protecting it in a government that doesn't seem to get any better at other sectors.
Of of the BBCs jobs is to scrutinise the government. Editorial independence is essential. You can argue how well it does this, but if the government has direct control over its funding, it clearly won't be doing that task any better.
my understanding of the justification for a special system is that it's inherently more fragile and more tempting to attack than other government services, which generally provide tangibly vital, life-preserving services, rather than less tangible artistic and cultural ones, and the particular form of the service lends itself to being funded in a way that wouldn't work for other more vital services
healthcare is possibly one of the few that could (i.e. does in other Western countries) work similarly, but people including me would undoubtedly despise it. most things need some kind of mandated funding otherwise they would fail and people would die, go homeless, not have a military or live tangibly worse lives, and mandated taxed funding is generally better because it relies more on those with broader shoulders
overall I personally reject your notion that there's some kind of subversive justification for it
It's not modern, although I don't disagree that it's more common. But you do have jokes even back to the 80s of "world ending, women and minorities most effected."
interesting. I suppose the women's rights movement has been around for a very long time
[dead]
"Modern form of criticism" - pointing out the fact that the license fee is unfair and as a consequence disproportionately affects women.
>> women are simply less skilled at dealing with situations like this and need more help
Wow. That's a bold take.
I think you know how disingenuous you're being here, so I won't bless this with a genuine response
its ok for women to get prosecuted. they are not special
Your complaint would have much more merit if there wasn’t hundreds of years of examples of women being systematically discriminated against and having the system unfairly target them.
my complaint would have less merit if GP weren't simply using those hundreds of years as rhetorical technique
this modern style of criticism is so tiring.
It’s a modern style of criticism because….anyone…anyone…
We should ignore historical reality. It’s makes you uncomfortable.
>It’s a modern style of criticism because….anyone…anyone…
are you going through a tunnel?
in all seriousness I don't know what you're trying to say
BBC would do anything to keep it going sadly
Some remarkable doublethink from the BBC in that article: "The BBC said licence fee avoidance did not bring with it a criminal record. A spokesperson said: “Details of the offence are not held on the Police National Computer – so while there is a criminal conviction there is no criminal record.”"
So yeah, people, mainly women, go to prison but I guess it's not a big deal on paper.
no one is going to prison for not paying the license fee. the article brings up prison, but only as a way to sneakily associate it with non-license fee payment in a way that clearly worked on you
And yet many people (mainly women) go to prison for, in essence, not paying the licence fee. The fact that they technically go to prison for not complying with a court order is merely splitting hairs.
I cancelled my license in the wake of the Saville scandal when it was finally admitted what was common knowledge inside the BBC: that they had been covering up a sex offender on their payroll for years. Obviously 'lessons were learned' so when Huw Edwards came along they repeated all the same mistakes.
is it splitting hairs though? they're going to prison for refusing to engage with the justice system, which is a very normal thing to go to prison for the world over. what the original offence was isn't really relevant
> is it splitting hairs though? they're going to prison for refusing to engage with the justice system, which is a very normal thing to go to prison for the world over. what the original offence was isn't really relevant
It is relevant, though. If someone who wouldn't otherwise have been dragged into the receiving end of the justice system gets dragged into it, and then has to comply with all its bureaucracy, it matters whether or not that person should have been dragged into it. ("Should" in both a legal sense and a sense of morality or equity.)
my perspective is that we shouldn't be shaping our laws based on whether the least competent 0.001% of society can deal with the administrative implications. if you're so incompetent that you can't handle any of the many many stages between paying your license fee and going to prison, then you've got bigger issues and perhaps you should be in care or still in school
on the other hand if they're deliberately not engaging with those stages, then it's hard to really feel much sympathy
For the most part it's just because they're poor and can't budget either a one off or monthly payment for the fee.
if it goes all the way to going the stage of going to prison, then there are clearly bigger issues than this
They don't need to - the court will take it out of their wages or be edits before they receive them.
You have to actively try to defraud the court by lying about your earnings to face prison.
You keep mentioning the "mainly women" bit. Does that really matter that much? If mainly men were the ones impacted, would that change how good or bad the policy is?
It matters under the UK's equality laws. If something like this affects one class more than another then there's an obligation to learn why that is, as the answer may lead to a court finding the, in this case enforcement process, to be unlawful.
It always seems crazy to me that in the early 1980s the BBC undertook the Computer literacy project, commissioned Acorn Computers to manufacture the BBC Micro, and produced educational content to support learning and use around said system itself.
I understand why the chances of that being a profitable enterprise now given the development of computing hardware are practically zero, but even the idea that the BBC would produce interesting educational content now seems wild (not counting documentaries as that's not often something that provides information you can act on and use). If I want that kind of content now it's pretty much a guarantee that I'll end up on YouTube.
Nowadays they're a non-neutral-seeming news outlet and producer of low-risk dreck that also demands I pay the UK TV Licence fee even just to watch _other_ channels. Do I need a reading licence to read books written by other people? Didn't think so.
At this point it's simply a subscription fee for a service I don't want, and so I don't subscribe. Bring back quality content (subjective of course, but some variety would go a long way), perhaps some risk-taking (something on par with Channel 4's Utopia seems like a good goal). Oh, and perhaps cut the salaries of some of the unnecessarily highly-paid reporters. Just a thought.
They still produce a huge amount of content in conjuction with the Open University, and most of that educational content you're referring to was OU content as well. The quality of it is much better than it was (trust me).
The "non-neutral-seeming news" you refer to suggests you've bought into the narrative proposed by those who don't feel served by it - both the far right and the far left, which suggests it must be doing something right - and famously the BBC has some of the most stringent and well-thought through editorial guidelines on earth. If somebody is telling you the BBC is biased, they're also probably suggesting some other news source (their own? GB News? Fox? An anti-vaxx group on FB?), is not.
The BBC could be doing a lot more to monetise through BBC Worldwide (their commercial arm), a massive, and massively popular, back catalogue to a point where the license fee could be reduced or even eliminated. The idea it becomes a generic streaming platform or relies on commercials regularly gets floated, but it's worth pointing out that the biggest supporters of that plan are owners of commercial media companies that feel they would win out and their narratives and perspectives would get to dominate.
It is a ~£13 subscription, sure, but compare it to what you get compared to say Sky TV, which also has adverts, and think about whether clipping it back to an offering similar to C4 (also public sector owned, but ad funded), would be something that actually makes you happier, and whether that editorial integrity could be maintained and all that local radio and journalism could still get paid for - they're arguably the only organisation still doing local journalism in the UK given the dog's dinner Reach is making of local papers.
I sense the future is going to a Reith-ian reset, and you'll see less investment in lower-rating, higher-cost programming (bye bye Eastenders or other soaps), sustained investment in audience favourites like Strictly, and perhaps a dial-up in drama to take on the commercial sector that they can then monetise through BBC Worldwide (including getting streamers to pay for access to it).
As to the other broadcasters, the picture is a little less confusing: the studios and production companies are doing fine, even if they're now selling to Amazon, Netflix, Apple and Disney. The channels themselves will just use their brand to shift people into those channels. Unfortunately, they're miles behind on the tech (just go and try ITV X - it's awful from a UX perspective), but they'll figure it out.
this is a fantastic, well-thought-out analysis of the kind that is all too rare amongst people talking about the BBC. thank you
I'd add that while I agree that the BBC could and perhaps should be doing a lot more to make profit from BBC Worldwide, I think the concern there is that too much focus on that could start to bring in unwanted incentives, such as prioritising the demands of foreign viewers over domestic, or even advertisers
To some extent, that has already happened. Strictly is now in almost every major market under a different name (Dancing with the Stars, etc.), Attenborough nature-docs are widely revered and incredibly popular, and Top Gear got into almost every country except the US (which got its own version), until a series of controversies (first Hammond almost dying, then Clarkson punching a producer, then Chris Evans being himself, then Flintoff almost dying), pushed it into the "let's stop doing this" list - at huge cost.
For things where a format sale works (shows that need to be made locally to resonate, like Strictly), I think your concern is less of a risk. Attenborough/Top Gear style high-quality expensive content packages are more of a concern, but I think the worst we've seen there is that they end up doing weird things with the timings. You know in the UK that Attenborough docs run for 50 minutes, and there is then a 10 minutes "how we made it" bit? Foreign markets don't get that last bit - they buy the 50 minutes package, put ads around it to get it to an hour. In the UK we get a 10 minute filler DVD bonus track.
more interesting info. I'd also add Doctor Who as a really prominent example of it. the most recent series of Doctor Who is quite obviously aimed at more of an American audience, with a star known to Americans, being released on Disney, with Disney production values. whether that fully counts or is just a product of a production partnership or whether the production partnership is itself a sign of it, I do not know
BBC is great but it is very biased. There’s no such thing as neutral news and the front page is full of pro-western and pro-british articles. You could argue it’s in the middle of the British political spectrum but that’s inherently a bias towards the status quo.
There’s nothing wrong with biased news but it’s important to recognize what their perspective really is. Thinking it’s neutral is dangerous and you’ll never know the truth if you believe that!
1. Go and read the editorial guidelines.
2. Find the same ones for your favourite news source.
3. Ask if the balance is reasonable for a British broadcaster, paid for by British people, to address stories of interest of British interest from a British perspective by applying those editorial guidelines.
4. Go and explore the times that the BBC has actively investigated and reported on exclusives critical of British foreign and domestic policy - there's more examples than you'd find at any other broadcaster in the World, I think.
If you'd like to point out examples of where the editorial guidelines are poor, or weren't applied in a particular scenario, or even an example of perceived bias that is entirely unbalanced, I'm happy to hear it. More often than not people complaining of bias are complaining that it reported something they disagreed with, but like I say, both the far left and the far right hate the BBC, anarchists hate it, authoritarians hate it - if they're annoying everyone apart from the more sensible majority that want to see all sides of a story, they're probably doing something very right.
You’re completely missing the point and I don’t think you actually know what “bias” means.
> a British broadcaster, paid for by British people, to address stories of interest of British interest from a British perspective
This is exactly my point. You’re going to get news from maybe 1% of the full ideological spectrum and nowhere near “all sides” of any story. The BBC has a strong bias towards status quo opinions (“ of British interest from a British perspective”). The news they don’t report on is equally as important as what they do publish.
It's the same with Canadian television. Pre-2000 its full of interesting, educational programming, post-2000 its a wasteland (not including Pre-Netflix Trailer Park Boys).
TV was seen as a great learning tool in the day.
The idea that you could cheaply and affordably replay lectures with video, demonstrate concepts visually, show foreign lands and peoples, all with low cost of production was captivating to many.
Computers were initially seen by educators as a path to interactive TV. Making it easy to find video info, and to index it, even rotate images (repair videos and part assemble for example).
Point is, TV was seen a more than entertainment, it was a tool that could be employed to teach. Computers more so.
Then the Internet came, and it was at first mostly educational, intellectual. Sort of the inverse of what it is now.
Once everything exploded, it became entertainment primarily. Sort of like TV. The educational aspect is there, but muted.
Obtaining information from potentially interactive websites is better in every way than via TV. It’s obsolete technology.
Therefore, the BBC needs to transition to a website that happens to send signals out via TV for legacy users, but primarily, it’s competing with TikTok/Youtube/Khan Academy/Instagram/Whatsapp/Reddit/Disney/Comcast/Netflix/Sony/WarnerBros Discovery/etc. They all compete with each other, globally.
BBC sells minutes of entertainment/education/etc, and there are a fixed number of minutes in a day.
Given that the BBC has failed to offer their own solution for the many British and other people living abroad or with second homes abroad who would be interested in accessing their content, and instead driven us to consume a small subset of their content through Netflix, my sympathy is limited.
Is Britbox not available in your country? Here in Australia it has relatively high market penetration even.
No OP, but I'm in a smallish EU country and it's not available here.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.britbox.us
Not available in my country (where I am today)
In the US and watch Britbox and Acorn at least as much as other providers now. We watch a lot of Aussie and British shows, new and old, color and B/W.
The BBC made really great shows. If they go under, it’s a shame. I would pay tax to help the BBC keep going. I’d pay the Aussies, too, if they’re not getting comp’d.
BritBox is available in a very limited set of countries: Australia, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, United States.
Unfortunately that's the reality. I'm into Doctor Who but in Asia it's pretty much impossible to watch it through any legal means.
the new new one is meant to be available on disney plus
not sure about the others though
Tor Browser, set the exit Node to one from the United Kingdom and disable JavaScript.
Why we love HN.
£5/mo VPS and get_iplayer?
This is how I watched Match of the Day from Japan for months
just change your dns to a UK server
You're mixing up different bits of tech, streaming services (like BBC's iPlayer) don't care (or know) what DNS servers you're using. To get around their geo-blocking you need to change your IP address, either by using a VPN service or a proxy server.
He's probably talking about one of those "smart dns proxy" services. The way they work is that they return a proxy server IP for geoblocked domains, and the normal IP for everything else. The proxy server in turn figures out which server to connect to using the SNI header.
It's misleading to call it "change your dns to a uk server", but he's also not totally making it up either.
Yeah I'm not accusing them of lying, sure if they use a service that also includes proxying then that can bypass geo restrictions it just has nothing to do with DNS or the country the DNS server is in.
why say something if you quite clearly don't actually know anything about the thing you're saying? do you really think I'm saying this without having done this myself many times? without it being a well-known and well-publicised method?
edit: deleting this comment rather than keep editing it to go with your edits. Please research how geo-blocking works.
my friend I will ask you again: why are you saying this if you haven't actually tried it? google it if you don't believe me. I have used the technique many times, and just because you think geoblocking works one way does not mean that it actually does
If it worked for you, that could be because when you changed your DNS server you also changed your public IP, or possibly because you used a service that doesn't just provide DNS but also caches content meaning you were accessing it without touching the BBC's servers.
There just isn't any aspect of BBC's geo blocking that cares what DNS servers you use, and if you go spend 5 minutes on Google looking into how geo-blocking works you won't find anyone talking about DNS servers being relevant.
I can't speak to your personal experience as I wasn't there, but I do have experience on the side of actually doing geo-blocking so I can say with confidence how that works. Apart from anything, the website / streaming service literally doesn't have any way of knowing what country your DNS server is in... the DNS server is just the thing that your computer asks "where does bbc.co.uk point to?" and it replies with the IP address for that domain. From the BBC's point of view your visit looks identical regardless of which DNS server gave that answer. There are ways of doing geo-blocking that are more complicated than just IP address (though BBC doesn't use them, it just goes on IP address), but none of them involve DNS.
why are you over and over again just guessing at what's true? literally google the words "dns geoblocking" and then come and apologise
I just did that search, and several pages talk about "smart DNS services" which also proxy your IP... not a single result suggesting that DNS itself is relevant.
The thing is, I'm not guessing, I'm someone who has actually spent time learning about how networking works, doing my first Cisco course when I was 17, and then in my adult career I've on multiple occasions been involved in implementing geo-blocking.
So I'm sorry if I haven't been clear, or have given the impression of being an idiot to the point that you think not worth listening to anything I say, but if you actually go and read up about how geo-blocking works you will find out that I'm not making things up when I say that BBC cannot tell the location of your DNS server, and if you've found that using a particular DNS service does bypass the restrictions then it still has nothing to do with DNS other than that the DNS provider is also offering you a proxy service.
Here's a starting point: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geo-blocking
look, perhaps I've been a bit uncivil in the way I've responded to you, but I think these are what you're confusing:
-- a site not being able to tell the location of your dns server, which is true
-- your dns server not affecting how sites can adjudge your location, which is not
>-- a site not being able to tell the location of your dns server, which is true
>-- your dns server not affecting how sites adjudge your location, which is not
Neither of these statements are definitively true/false.
1. Sites can most certainly tell the IP (and thus the location) of your DNS server. There are many sites that demonstrate this, just search for "dns leak test". Whether sites actually use this is another question.
2. Sites can serve different IPs (servers) depending on the DNS server, or even the client (through the edns client subnet extension). Some CDNs use this strategy to route requests to the closest server. However, this fact is a red herring when it comes to assessing whether "just change your dns to a UK server" is a viable strategy for getting bbc iplayer to work, because its geoblock checks based on IP of the http request, not through DNS.
There's also the question of "smart dns proxies"[1], which make it seem like all you're doing is "change your dns server to a UK server", but there's far more that goes under the hood than just changing your DNS server, because it's actually proxying your traffic as well. Changing your dns server to a uk server that isn't a smart dns proxy wouldn't get you pass bbc's geoblocks.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44013929
British TV is doing _great_ in the streaming era: black mirror, adolescence, peaky blinders, the crown, call the midwife, derry girls, downtown abbey; and so many great police procedurals: line of duty, endeavour, the bay, Sherlock, grace; even those Harlan coben miniserieses - the ones with at least one absurd plot twist per episode - are great fun!
While I’ll be among the first to moan that we’ll never see another red dwarf, python, tinker tailor/smiley’s people, yes minister, father ted [0] .. British tv is still producing great stuff.
It’s the “bureaucrats” in the bbc who are under threat from streaming. I’m not losing sleep!
[0] made in Britain; simply could not have been made in Ireland as was.
Here in Sweden the public service SVT has had its streaming service for years and I watch that more than I watch any of the commecial services I pay for (currently three of them).Incidentally that means mostly watching BBC (crime) series as SVT buy the rights to ridiculous numbers of those and many are very good. I would not mind if broadcast tv was shut down, but some older people would probably complain.
We watch svtplay with our kids so much and it's much better than the garbage YouTube and other streaming services try to push onto kids.
What I really don't understand is:
The UK is one of the few countries (among the countries with universal health care) that doesn't have a separate tax for health care. That means they can handle earmarking huge amounts of money for a public service out of the general taxation.
Why do they need to use this tv license thing for BBC then?
The licence was introduced when television sets were an exotic luxury so adding it to the tax rises used to pay for the NHS wasn't the obvious move for a Labour government. Radio licenses existed before the NHS or most other benefits were a thing.
As for why it hasn't been abolished like the radio licence... well any government that does that loses the ability to indirectly threaten it when they don't like the tone of the nation's most watched news channel by muttering darkly about how it's iniquitous funding model needs abolishing, and gets blamed for the changes people don't like.
> Why do they need to use this tv license thing for BBC then?
Even with horrendously massive cuts to public services and the Civil Service, the government has a tiny headroom in its budget, in the single-digit billions. The BBC cannot be funded from general taxation without the licence fee.
> The BBC cannot be funded from general taxation without the licence fee.
The question also is whether Ou want to directly pay it from taxes. Taxes fully depend on the current mood of the government. The fee does a bit of indirection limiting the direct influence.
> Taxes fully depend on the current mood of the government. The fee does a bit of indirection limiting the direct influence.
Yes. In fact, that was the whole point of various "arms length" bodies - publicly owned, but largely shielded from political influence. Of course, this government took a gleeful sledgehammer to that principle by abolishing NHS England and assuming direct control via the Ministry of Health. We'll see how many institutions will be similarly butchered in the remaining 4 years.
My wife and I agree that we would happily pay $400 a year to be able to use the iPlayer in the US. We are not alone. Just open up the TV license to anyone.
The US streaming giants seem to be doing a pretty good job of ensuring they themselves do not survive. Perhaps all British TV needs to do is wait out the enshittification that's already in play.
My thinking exactly. Got Netflix couple of years ago because of the Witcher and since then I'm finding it hard to find anything watchable. I was going to say that they heavily favor quantity over quality. But not even that is true, since their selection is rather limited. The search result "we don't have X, but you might like A, B, C" which are usually the same and unrelated things over and over, appears way too often.
The "Is it cake" made me cancel Netflix. That and some shows about car restoration with focus on drama.
I don't want to pay and end up supporting such dreg.
It is funny though. For some reason I almost watched 5 episodes of is it cake and a lot of the car restoration shows.
It is like you default to time wasting when you have nothing you want to see. And I don't want that exposure ...
What you describe is exactly how I felt about regular broadcast/cable. What you wanted to watch when you had time to watch might not have been on, so you channel surf until you find something. Maybe it was something you found interesting, or maybe you just got tired of surfing and just left it on whatever pissed you off the least. Very similar to doom scrolling a streaming platform’s listings where you realize you’ve just spent 15 minutes looking at the menu but not actually watching anything.
Ye. It is a kinda strange phenomena. As if bad shows are a lesser emotional commitment or something.
I think it's less commitment and more of just waving the flag and just putting something on to just be mindless and zone out for a bit. The mental exhaustion of scrolling through banal entry after banal entry of pablum content just wears on a person. It's definitely first world problems though. I've started to just hit the power button when I find myself in that state and finding something else to do. Even if it's just playing with the four legged roommates.
At least with YouTube you can end up in weird and interesting rabbit holes (I recommend “moving large things with trucks” and “blowing up buildings” and “railway snow clearing”). Sometimes you even learn something.
All the cable/Netflix slop ends up being basically the same story.
Netflix is far more robust and smarter than what you could ever strike them down for. These aren't people who just started a few weeks ago in the industry, and they are far from the people who are equally long lived dinosaurs who can't or won't keep up and dies in the past.
You're just not the target market anymore, and that's more than fine, because there's a few hundred million that are, and that number is growing, not shrinking, in fact they're growing faster than ever.
I wouldn't hold your breath. Take a look at revenues and they tell a different story. Here is Netflix
2021: $29.698 billion
2022: $31.616 billion
2023: $33.723 billion
2024: $39.001 billion
YouTube is profitable.
YouTube has both super high quality stuff (lectures etc) and incredible trip.
But it'll be there even if AppleTV or HBO go bust YouTube will still be there.
Simple, by being much better and well written perhaps?
This is way too far down among the replies, and I think it hits the nail on the head.
Offer something people want to watch, and they'll come.
They’re still limited because they don’t have the budgets.
If you have a great script where are you going to take it? Netflix with a massive budget or the BBC / Channel 4 with a tiny one. Black mirror did not start on Netflix for example.
I’d pay more for bbc content than i do for Netflix or prime. It’s typically very good content that is strongly geo locked behind iplayer and you have to play whack a mole to get it…
The answer is to become a digital-only, subscription service, and to keep producing the good stuff.
Basically, combine what Britbox does today in some countries and what TheBox used to do for BitTorrent.
First and foremost, be the only place current British tv can be seen. On top of that, have a deep, exhaustive archive of past British content.
NYTimes.com is a good model. If you want what they got, you subscribe, no matter who or where you are. The model works.
How can traditional British TV survive anything? Four episodes is considered a reasonable annual output.
Anything from the Natural World unit is second-to-none. Green Planet, Asia, Wild Isles, etc are all gob smacking.
I didn't realize it was this bad. Though, the last British TV show I consumed was Dr. Who, and I quit watching about the time Capaldi took the stage.
I cannot think of another show that I've watched... There was a David Tennant murder mystery show that was quite dark, but I didn't finish that one, either.
Broadchurch
If you want quality it takes time and focus. Given how much content there is and how little free time we all have, the fact that traditional British TV shows stop when they're good rather than running any successful show into the ground is a point in their favour IMO.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w09YzTMY1qk#t=62s
Good TV programmers against a 90% reality TV turds/mediocre series even on paid networks.
they could start by producing things people want to watch...
'Traditional british tv' has produced some of the best shows to be ever made. The writing, acting and production quality of the 70s-80s classic british shows surpasses anything being produced these days in 4k. Spent so many delectable hours watching old shows from that era, some of them quite obscure. Modern shows feel like mass-produced in an assembly line, devoid of what one would call 'class'.
It's also produced some of the worst. Other channels and services have also produced some of the best and some of the worst. Because it's fairly subjective and there's no accounting for taste.
It feels a bit disingenous to compare a limited number of already very well known classic programs that have survived the test of time against the entire breadth of newer programs (of which there are vastly more in number, so the likelihood of even being seen is much lower).
this kind of take is usually the preserve of nostalgic old men who've just discovered YouTube comments, so I'm surprised to see it rephrased so many times here. if you aren't finding high quality modern British-made TV shows it's because you're not looking or you're unwilling to try new things. Wolf Hall, Line of Duty, Slow Horses, Rivals, Fleabag, Adolescence, Inside no 9, Veep, etc etc etc etc. I could name 10 more. TV is more stratified and yes there are a lot of worthless filler game shows and talk shows, but just as it was in the 70s and 80s, there are plenty of stand-out shows that will last the test of time
Wolf Hall - originally a great adaptation of a superior book but the last series terribly constrained by budget and cliche background music.
Line of Duty - decent procedural but increasingly bonkers stories and hammy script/delivery.
Adolescence - well produced but liberal scare story. Netflix!
Haven't seen the others.
Hardly in the class of historical Beeb let alone contemporary US brilliance.
>Wolf Hall ...
you're nitpicking. it's a high class, well-produced, well-acted, British-made TV show, by the BBC, of a very high quality that would be well-regarded in any era (if you ignore the weird racial thing they did in S2)
>Line of Duty
your opinion is absolutely in the minority, which isn't to say it's wrong, but it's a very well regarded, high class show that's widely seen as well above "decent procedural"
>Adolescence
whether it's liberal or paid for by Netflix is irrelevant to whether it's a high quality British-made tv show
>you haven't watched the others
then you're going to struggle to give a useful opinion on this matter, aren't you?
>Hardly in the class of historical Beeb
every historical BBC show you can name will have myriad minor subjective criticisms of the like you've just produced
>let alone contemporary US brilliance.
if you think US TV is even remotely comparable with UK TV, you're not paying attention. the US is long since out of its golden era, which pretty much died with Game of Thrones. US media has an order of magnitude more financial means than that of the UK, and yet what have they created of any real quality in the last few years besides White Lotus? they repeatedly fail to even remotely approach the class and quality of our TV. on the rare occasions they do get close, it's on the back of British actors or British production
> and yet what have they created of any real quality in the last few years besides White Lotus?
Now you’re just acting like the OP. There’s plenty of highly regarded us shows from the last few years. Just go look the highest rated current TV shows on rotten tomatoes.
well you're right. admittedly I haven't watched much recently besides White Lotus. on the other hand, it is true that most very highly regarded American shows have British actors in key roles, or creatives in production
... because American shows are where the most money and best scripts are, luring British talent there. I.e., the point of the discussion at hand.
most money, yes. best scripts, no.
I tried watching wolf hall because I love historical novels/shows, but I really struggled with it. Though I also struggled with the actual book so maybe it's something more fundamental.
Everyone dislikes some things. Not everyone likes classics such as Monty Python or Only Fools and Horses either. You're confusing "I don't like it" with "it's bad".
Confused? You've misread.
I didn't dislike any of them, all are fine at least; the first series of Wolf Hall is particularly good.
Is it fair to compare 20 years' worth of TV to the past few years' worth?
Survivorship bias is also likely involved.
i think you'd find lots of people disagree. Were there some great BBC shows in the 70s and 80s? Sure.
I think you'd find lots pf people who find some relatively recent streaming shows to be amazing. You may not like them but there are many fans of shows like Stranger Things, The Crown, The Handmaid's Tale, The Queen's Gambit, Silo, Severance, Succession, ....
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The class it is missing is the working class:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy8xjvzx5zno
Feel this is a disingenuous question, as British TV will do just fine on streaming giants. Just the BBC cannot and will not make them, and struggling to survive.
Mobland on Paramount+
Grand Tour on Amazon
Clarkson's Farm on Amazon
Peaky Blinders on Netflix was made (and also broadcast) by the BBC.
Back in 2013, when BBC still was airing Top Gear with Hammond, May & Clarkson, and things like Bake Off.
Recent seasons of Dr Who were made with Disney+. They have killed a 60 year old franchise.
Hardly killed. I've been watching Doctor Who since the 1970s and there's been a lot of variation in quality over that time. I stopped watching it sometime around the Colin Baker era as I lost interest in it, but started watching it again with the Christopher Eccleston reboot. Then, I started getting disillusioned with the Peter Capaldi episodes - possibly the best actor for playing the Doctor, but given awful scripts (except "Heaven Sent" which is possibly the best ever episode). I struggled through Jodie Whittaker's seasons as I didn't like her portrayal nor the stories, but now I have to say that I really enjoy Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor even though there's been good and bad episodes of his.
I actively dislike Disney (except maybe TRON and the Black Hole), but I don't think they've killed Doctor Who.
I watched in the 70s too. But never got onboard with the Eccleston reboot.
There are no plans to make more Doctor Who, if it was good they would continue making more. So it's being shelved is probably a more an appropriate phrase.
Someone might take a chance again in several years.
"Paused" may be more accurate.
https://www.tvzoneuk.com/post/doctorwho-futurereport-may25
> The Mirror reports that the series will return to BBC One for future series, with Russell T Davies already working on scripts for an additional two series, irrespective of whether Disney decide to continue in their partnership with the BBC beyond this series.
Davies is doing a show for Channel 4, Tip Toe.
https://www.channel4.com/press/news/russell-t-davies-returns...
Cool - I really "enjoyed" Queer As Folk.
You're just moving the goalposts now; it didn't end until 2022, and what I was responding to was the suggestion that there's no inherent problem with British content, it just needs to be on modern streaming platforms: yes, and the BBC has also participated in that.
Top Gear with that trio ending wasn't a content problem, Clarkson punched a producer and was fired. You can say well that was a bad decision they should have valued keeping him at all costs etc., but there was no good solution there really, he was divisive well before that issue, if they kept him they'd have pleased fans and upset others. The show wasn't (immediately) axed; that probably quite reasonably seemed like the best compromise.
Not with that crap it won’t.
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They can try making more of what people want and charging for it with ads. People liked The Office, Mr Bean, Doctor Who. The BBC can produce perfectly good telly if they want to be competitive. Don't be Canada and subsidize mediocrity and bad art with public money. Soft power should be earned, not bought and paid by public coffers.
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We've banned this account – not only for this comment, it drew our attention to the comment history which includes several egregious comments, including some that are abusive towards other members of the community.
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it wasn't just the BBC, it was the police, hospitals, the royal family, the prime minister, the music industry, etc etc etc
"In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile" is a good (modulo the horror of what he was doing) read. People were aware of his penchant for the young and his predatory nature in the mid-50s - almost a decade before he was on the BBC.
That reminds me on Belgium.
in what sense?
It should at least not be allowed to police itself in the first instance, as we saw with the Edwards case.
They can do like Sweden's public service, steal everyone's money, wheter you watch the garbage or not. Great service that.
The BBC won’t enable 4K on AppleTV, so I don’t bother.
I like the beeb, but I don't watch it since I can only buy an annual licence and if they can afford to pay millions on individual presenters they don't need my money.
Bring in monthly subs and cap presenter salaries and I'll dip in from time to time.
I agree that they should let people subscribe monthly, but this is a completely illogical take. you might as well say you don't want to go to the cinema because the lead actor was paid the market rate for the job. if you don't like Gary Lineker, just say that, don't come out with this sideways attempt at nobility
Gary Lineker, the radio presenters, news readers. Fine if you're commercial but in no world is it justified to pay the likes of Huw Edwards £600k to read the news, then whinge about not having enough money as a public broadcaster.
"Oh, but if we don't pay them they'll leave"
Let them go! I'd happily read some words for a few hours each day for a mere £200k.
Footballers make 300k a week and no one complains. This is a post about the slim survival chances of British media.. well salary caps will be the nail in the coffin as talent will simply go whey get the best deal.
Footballers don't take 300k/week of tax payer's money.
it's not tax payers' money
You're technically correct (the best kind of correct), but the TV license is very much like a tax as you're required to pay for it just for having equipment that can possibly receive broadcast TV.
this isn't true. you're required to pay for it if you watch live TV. you're perfectly allowed to have a TV or laptop or any other device that can pick up live TV
Sorry, I haven't checked the rules in a while. It used to be the case that owning a reception device required a license, but as you say, that's no longer the case.
You think the BBC License Fee is not a tax? Lol.
>Fee
Lol. They can call it a non-voluntary charitable donation. It doesn't matter what they call it. It's still a tax. You probably think "National Insurance" is not a tax.
You understand that what something is called is not always the same as what it is, right?
> Footballers make 300k a week and no one complains
To be fair, plenty of fans (and the occasional pundit) complain (and have been complaining for years) but unless the authorities get involved (FA, UEFA, FIFA, etc.) and implement proper financial controls (there's some coming in 2025/26 around player salaries but we also need controls on money coming from TV rights, self-sponsorships, etc.) with actual transparent penalties (they're still soft-pedalling City whilst kicking Everton and Forest), nothing will happen.
As an Everton fan I agree about city but I don’t think we should try and control these other things. You’re literally trying to limit the input (tv revenue) and output (salaries). If this happened countries that believe in a free market will outcompete and destroy the premier league which is one of the few things this country has going for it..
Like I said. Free market, who cares. But not for a publicly funded organisation.
And if one group of talent moves on it'll make space for the next generation.
>it'll make space for the next generation.
space promptly filled by B or C tier talent as the best go and work elsewhere to get paid appropriately
The best paid football players aren't easily replaced with cheaper talent though. Top clubs will need to compete against other top clubs, so e.g. a striker with better performance is going to be heavily in demand and can make a lot of difference to the success of the club.
Arguably, news readers aren't critical to the success of the news broadcast (the content probably makes far more difference), though I can see that presenters can make a big difference to the popularity of shows. I've got nothing against Gary Lineker (quite like him, but rarely watch him on telly), but I do object to being "forced" to pay for his excessive salary when they should be helping younger, unknown talent to get exposure etc.
The world we live in, apparently, since they're getting that much money to do those jobs as we speak. Might as well complain about executive pay and the Royal estates while you're at it.
I completely agree with and understand this reaction to people like Huw Edwards being paid stupid amounts of money to read words off a screen while managing the colossal task of simultaneously looking concerned, doing a serious voice, and not vomiting or getting their nipples out. I personally think that BBC News should just be disbanded or spun off into a separate entity, because otherwise one day it will bring the whole institution down with it. reading the news is a genuinely low-skill job that could be done by literally anyone with a few weeks of training
however, I think you're very wrong to include the presenting of entertainment and educational shows with that. presenting these shows well is something that requires a genuine art. if news presenters wages were capped, nothing significant would change. if entertainment presenters wages were capped, there'd be a huge talent drain and shows would become worse in quality, giving a massive advantage to the generally awfully produced commercial channels that make lower quality content interspersed with brainrot fucking adverts and phone in quiz competitions
The license fee is in fact available monthly.
It's a way to pay the annual fee monthly. You can't cancel whenever you want.
You can cancel your TV licence part of the way through a year and get a refund if you’ve paid in advance. It’s not as easy as cancelling a streaming service though.
https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/topics/c...
LOL did you even read the page you've linked to?
OK great, I can get a refund if I move into a care home. I think you're missing the point.
You’re misreading. No need to move in to a care home.
You can cancel your TV licence at a monthly interval and give the reason “I no longer watch [UK broadcast] TV on any channel or service, or use BBC iPlayer.”
If you pay for the whole year in advance you can apply for a refund for unused months.
I hope it doesn't survive. But I'm sure it will.
It is a propaganda outfit (and was from inception). It has special legislation to force TV owners to pay - this tax is called the 'license fee'. In the past only people who had been 'cleared' could work there.
While people think that the UK's recent legislation is dystopian, the reality is it was ever thus as we see with the bbc. I would be very glad to see it go, but that won't happen because - it's utility as a megaphone to the governance system remains very high.
Here is the bbc admitting it lied for -50-, sorry, 70 (!) years, to members of parliament even, about the vetting: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43754737
I certainly suspect this is only a partial disclosure - not only political outlooks would be considered.
Simply a lying, propagandising institution.
Like it or not, the BBC is the world's oldest public broadcaster; a pioneer in many ways. For the UK, there's a huge amount of prestige in that. Naturally, the BBC as an entity needs to preserve British values. Conservatism and political correctness doesn't automatically entail "lying" or propaganda.
The BBC that you see in the rest of the world is very much not the BBC you see in England. The English BBC is surprisingly myopic and totally fits the charge of propaganda.
Last time I watched BBC it was the news in the morning before work aboit ten years ago, I was lectured about black excellence and white fragility. Vile institution.
Operation YewTree
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Yewtree
I do not know why you are being downvoted - there is some hyperbole in your comment but your link (to the BBC itself!) is shocking and certainly justifies calling it a lying institution.
I do not think it is as dystopian as recent legislation. It did not intrude into our private lives!
the comment is being downvoted because its central premise is preposterous: the BBC lied about vetted people for MI5 30 years ago -> therefore it's a lying propaganda institution -> therefore it should be disbanded
first of all, even if MI5 vetting for this kind of thing wasn't a completely reasonable precaution--read Spycatcher if you don't know why--do you think the BBC had a choice in matters?
second, this was 30 years ago.
third, if we're going to just disband any institution that's silently beholden to MI5, you may as well abandon the whole country.
fourth, the BBC makes a metric tonne of fantastic content enjoyed by people all over the world, and yet somehow it should be disbanded for trying to keep soviet spies out over 30 years ago?
people just love to hate the BBC, egged on by the cowardly, self-interested right-wing media, and it's just sad, because it's genuinely one of the truly great things about the country. it's our greatest artistic cultural achievement by a long distance
> even if MI5 vetting for this kind of thing wasn't a completely reasonable precaution--read Spycatcher if you don't know why--do you think the BBC had a choice in matters?
There is always a choice. People could have refused, resigned, spoken out.
> second, this was 30 years ago.
Short enough for people who were complicit in it to be decisionmakers now.
> if we're going to just disband any institution that's silently beholden to MI5, you may as well abandon the whole country.
They need to be rooted out. They and their ilk are the entities that actually subverted the country. We used to have principles and care about them, or at least pretend to.
> the BBC makes a metric tonne of fantastic content enjoyed by people all over the world, and yet somehow it should be disbanded for trying to keep soviet spies out over 30 years ago?
The BBC commissions some great content from great creators - as do all British TV channels. If you look at what the BBC itself does, there's a lot of bad there.
read Spycatcher. in the post-war/cold war era, Britain, particularly the upper classes, was fucking riddled with soviet agents, mostly British-born communist sympathisers who were activated by the USSR, and many of them could have been stopped from doing huge damage if simple vetting had been in place
this isn't mccarthyite nonsense, this isn't right-wing hatred for communism. I am a socialist. this is the absolute fact that a foreign power was actively, successfully pushing agents into positions in the establishment all over the country. do you think it's a coincidence the vetting stopped when the soviet union collapsed?
>The BBC commissions some great content from great creators - as do all British TV channels. If you look at what the BBC itself does, there's a lot of bad there.
do you genuinely believe that ITV, Dave, Channel 5, Sky, etc are producing or have ever produced content on par with the BBC?
Channel 4 is the only other channel that can even remotely compete, and I would imagine they too would have been equally under MI5's thumb if they'd been important enough to warrant it. going further, do you really think that any British TV channel would have spoken out if MI5 came to them and told them they needed to vet their employees as a matter of national security? even further, has any organisation ever done that in the history of MI5? in the global history of spy agencies?
> read Spycatcher
I'm not going to read a whole book to respond to an internet comment, especially when it sounds like it's from someone with vested interests very much on one side.
> in the post-war/cold war era, Britain, particularly the upper classes, was fucking riddled with soviet agents, mostly British-born communist sympathisers who were activated by the USSR, and many of them could have been stopped from doing huge damage if simple vetting had been in place
What "huge damage" was done? Britain was if anything doing better for itself in that era, and the USSR's success record speaks for itself.
> do you think it's a coincidence the vetting stopped when the soviet union collapsed?
No, of course not, that removed the funding and the excuse, as well as laying bare the complete failure of the intelligence establishment to accomplish anything useful (given that they'd been unable to see it coming).
this is genuinely fascinating. your viewpoint is that you want the BBC to be disbanded because they didn't reveal anti-soviet vetting 30 years ago, anti-soviet vetting you don't support because you actually don't mind there having been soviet spies, because the USSR had a great "success record" and the UK was more socialist at the time?
and you clearly knew this when you wrote your original comment? which leads me to the conclusion that your original comment was written as some kind of bizarre attempt at soviet apologism through an angle of attacking the BBC
how insanely odd and anachronistic. honestly, well done for maintaining such ideological rigidity for this long, I'm genuinely not-sarcastically impressed. it's like you woke up from a 30+ year coma
> people just love to hate the BBC, egged on by the cowardly, self-interested right-wing media, and it's just sad, because it's genuinely one of the truly great things about the country. it's our greatest artistic cultural achievement by a long distance
Sadly, lying for decades to everyone is indeed Britain's greatest artistic cultural achievement.
this is a mentally lazy response
I don't love lies or liars.
then hide yourself in a cave and never come out because everyone lies and everything lies and the world is built on lies
name an institution as large and wide and old as the BBC that hasn't told far more lies for far less honourable reasons than defending against soviet espionage
I agree with that ^ though I'd say the bbc has told more than it's fair share.
Must I love it?
of course you can love it or not love it, but I'd make my decision based on whether you enjoy its content rather than on what MI5 made them do during the cold war
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You don't think that it intruded into private lives, but I would disagree. If only certain information/ideas/programs are aired, you don't know what you don't know. You are not able to make informed decisions with only partial information. An institution such as the BBC operating without any push back for decades would be capable of directing culture and society, in an artificial way.
All media is propaganda.
At least it's not the made up right wing shit that runs America.
1 downvote explained.
It is funny to hear the US M5M declared "right wing" - it just isn't true. Right now broadcasters are in a bit of a minefield. Viewership is down, most broadcast stations are owned by a couple of companies, and rumor has it the administration may ban pharmaceutical advertising on television (which won't have teeth unless they explicitly ban native advertising). The pharma ads bankroll most mainstream media in the US, billions a year. (Note, I worked at one of the largest media empires in the US and watched the internal livestreams of the advertiser banquets)
And most pharma ads are not aimed at you and I, it's aimed at medical providers. That's how lucrative pharma marketing is for pharma.
And I completely disagree with your claim that all media is propaganda. Propaganda is a word that is defined. So I'll chalk that up to hyperbole. As in: if my objective is to make a nice song that people tap their feet to, is that propaganda because it has an objective? If so, then the word "propaganda" is diluted to the point of meaninglessness. You may as well say "all media is media."